WIPs and the public domain

[Falconius]

My badly-made point was that inadvertent thieves ("just pinning it to my wall" or "posting it here on NavelLeaflet without attribution or context so that I can find it later") don't care about copyright and folks that knowingly sell stolen goods also don't care because they will either disappear at first complaint and pop up elsewhere or are in a jurisdiction where this sort of thing is acceptable. It's up to the author to expend their own resources to defend their own works. At the end of the day, it's up to each author to determine how much effort they want to expend in defending past works compared to creating new works.

Visible signatures and watermarks are like locks on doors: they keep honest people honest but don't in any way deter a professional thief. Hidden watermarks and metadata are more like attaching nameplates to items in your home or recording serial number for electronics: they can help prove ownership in the context of an appropriate legal context, but will do nothing without enforcement.

Ah I see.

@Mouse Visible watermarks also look terrible, so it does more than deter grazing pests. Look at all the flack that guy got a few months ago when he posted good maps, but festooned in opaque watermarks. And the more subtle watermarks don't deter the random wandering person.

[Mouse]

LOL! Yes, I do remember, and I was one of the people screwing my face up at it.

I wasn't suggesting anything as extreme as that, but something far more subtle. You never know - we might start a trend in beautifully watermarked maps

EDIT: I do hope that Straf's friend doesn't think I'm being flippant. I really do know just how it feels. One of mine was borrowed - remember?

[Straf]

OK I have read through that other thread. Lots of good information in there. The stegosaurus thing sounds good. I'd heard of it before for sending secret messages in full view. You can send whole texts but suspicion may arise if the file size seems a bit large for the image or whatever. Anyway, I digress - the digital watermarking by hiding the text within the image is a pretty good idea. It shouldn't even be visible.

[Mouse]

An invisible dinosaur!

Wicked!

[Straf]

It helps to hide the text

[johnvanvliet]

first DEFINE!!!! what you mean by "ip" , there is really no such thing as "intellectual property "
- that is a made up thing
not until one puts it down on paper or object dose it then become the EXPRESSION of the idea
and it is that EXPRESSION that can be temporally restricted

Can we open a discussion on safeguarding the IP of the artist in some way?

copyright law?
patent law ?
Trademark law ?

all 3 do different things ( and do them DIFFERENTLY) , if you lump them all together you have a royal mess of contradictions

and define for WHAT countries ???????

the WTO gave Antigua a free pass on IGNORING usa copyright law

The stegosaurus thing

yes a dinosaur

did auto correct change that on you ?
if not.......
then please use a dictionary " steganography "

[Redrobes]

The text is supposed to be visible - but barely. Its not steganography, its just putting a water mark onto the image. In the same way as you get a water mark in paper - its supposed to be just visible. The idea is that when applied to an image its supposed to be difficult to reconstruct the image without the watermark. If you apply the water mark to a black and white image then its no good because you can just contrast enhance and you make it go away but to a colour image with a lot of detail its hard to seperate the words from the detail in the image and the water mark is not so conspicuous as to detract from the image.

If you want to apply a code to the image so that its fully invisible but you can detect that it was yours then you need to buy a proper application to do it and in any case, it will hold up to only so much image transformation before you can remove it. Normally that means that the image is also corrupted to the point that you wouldn't want it any more.

You have to decide on what sort of protection your looking to achieve. If you dont want people taking your image and using it in their game, or they take it and repost it claiming its not theirs but its cool anyway and you have a problem with that then dont post it in the first place. If you dont want them to repost it and claim its their own then use a water mark. If they have a habit of trying to remove the watermark, repost it and still claim its their own then use an invisible code and then lawyer up.

[Mouse]

Oops - my bad!

Sorry John!

Perhaps my little dinosaur joke with Straf was a little inappropriate, given the serious nature of the thread. But I really didn't mean to upset anyone.

[Straf]

OK, so my stegosaurus joke wasn't funny. Sorry Also I appear to have been using terms such as 'IPR' and 'public domain' erroneously.

Having read through the other thread I have a better appreciation of how difficult this is. Displaying anything anywhere does not prevent its unlawful use. I didn't realise that just by creating something automatically gives you the right to it. I can remember years ago being told that mailing yourself a copy of whatever it is you wanted to prove was your work was the only way as the date on the stamp would show that it had to be created on or before that date.

It was suggested to me that posting maps, images or pieces of work online may cause copyright issues for potential publishers because if it's already publicly accessible then a potential publisher might have difficulty securing full rights to the work. Apparently they can get rather picky about these things. Even fan art and fan fiction can cause their hands to hover over the big red button labelled 'Lawyer hotline' because if an author inadvertently uses a plot that's been created in fan fiction then the author of said fiction may try to sue the author and creator of the world - or their publisher.

The main thing I was wondering is if there is a way to safeguard, and as it turns out there is - like Redrobes says - don't post it. I like the watermark idea and I also like the dino steganograph as well. (I'm assuming that steganography is the practice and the 'device' itself is a steganograph) These will offer some kind of protection but does a statement have to be made or is copyright to be assumed unless stated otherwise that it's OK to use/republish?

[Falconius]

I think someone mentioned earlier, or on the other thread, that unless otherwise noted that all rights are reserved to the copyright owner (the creator). So you don't have to take any special action for it to fall under legal protection (meaning something actionable in court). And indeed I would suggest that publishing works or sharing them is one of protecting them because all these places use time stamps, and are third party, and so I would assume are valid evidence as to ownership (as well as having all the creation files if you have a big enough hard drive to save that stuff).