Maps being ripped off again - like Pinterest

[Redrobes]

Had some more reports of some artwork being taken from the guild and posted to other sites without artists approval. In some cases its been reported that the posts on the other sites have claimed ownership of some of the pieces.

As a website, if you post your artwork in the forums and you can get to it with a browser then there is nothing the site can do to stop people taking it because their browser has a local copy. So within the image you should sign it or mark the author where possible and if your concerned about it then do it in a way that makes the signature hard to remove from the artwork.

You can get fancy apps which embed codes into the pixels with some success and they form two groups. There are those that try to do it invisibly so that you can prove a piece of art was yours in retrospect - like in a court case over the ownership. And the other is where it modifies the image in a way that makes it obvious that the signature is part of the image but is hard to remove.

There has been a thread about this which I will try to link to where I discussed a way to modify an image with your copyright notice or logo. You take a small image of your signature and create an image which has areas slightly lighter or darker where you stamp the signature several times. Its a bit tedious.

So I have written some apps for windows and linux. Now for the windows ones I would expect them to work - not so sure about linux because of the base library sharing and this code is not open source so YMMV. If your on a Mac then your outta luck unless you can run windows apps in emulation.

The app is a command line one so there is only one file. There is no installer and you run it by opening a command prompt and typing the app name in. You can put the command line app into a script this way or embed it into a makefile or whatever and watermark your whole collection in one go. I'll post some images of how to run it. Its a very basic watermarking tool but its easy to use and very quick. Quick and dirty as we say !

There is a zip for windows and a zip for linux (zip because the site wont let me upload tar.gz). Within the windows zip there is a 32bit and a 64bit version of the app but they are otherwise exactly the same. In linux its obviously 64bit and I have put .exe on the end of the filename just to keep it clear.

If you have any issues with it then let me know - pm me. You can give it to whoever you want for free but I dont do open source so dont ask for the code. Also, check it for viruses as these are executables !

[Redrobes]

Within the zip files is a test image and a test mark which is your signature file. Attached is the image of the signature.

You then open a command prompt. You can normally find that under accessories or you can use the Run prompt and put in cmd.exe. In linux you open a terminal. Then you head over to the directory where you have unpacked the zip file by using the CD command such as "cd C:\MyWork\Watermark" in windows or "cd ~/Me/Watermark" in linux land. Then you type in the command similar to that shown in the next image: "Watermark.exe TestImage.png TestMark.png Result.jpg" for windows or "./Watermark.exe TestImage.png TestMark.png Result.jpg" in linux. And then it should show some text about what its doing which will be over in a blink. And you have your watermarked image.

Every time you run it you should get your image marked up with different positions and weights so that its very hard to determine a single image to remove all your marks from your maps. Ok - its not impossible to remove these but its more than trivial.

Hope this helps you all out.

[ChickPea]

I tested this in Ubuntu 16.10 and it works beautifully. The effect is very subtle, so it doesn't overwhelm the artwork, but I think it would be difficult to remove unless you were very determined. Thanks for making this available, Redrobes.

I was going to upload my pic to show my results, but it won't let me! (I believe permissions on this folder are very limited and, for example, regular users can't reply to you). Too bad. Although I'm not personally concerned with copyright, I think this tool is worth a look for those who are.