Re: AOL web troubles.. New AOL speedup seems to be a slowdown

["Brian Bruns" <bruns () 2mbit com>]

On Friday, January 30, 2004 12:34 AM [GMT-5=EST], Benjamin Chase
<chasecentral () icehouse net> wrote:

> I am certainly not trying to make the point that anyone taking part in
> using web accelerators is violating a copyright by viewing content that is
> not necessarily in the original form, but I've been witness to a few
> discussions on several prominent (photo.net, etc) websites where the issue
> was being raised that the act of the parent company (in this case AOL)
> collecting images on their proxy and redistributing them to their users
> (in a new form, recompressed) pretty much negates any digital watermarking
> present in an image.
>
> Am I concerned about it personally?  Not at all.  Since I shoot primarily
> 35mm transparency film, I have a physical original of a piece of work, and
> if I needed to prove an image was really mine, then I would produce the
> physical copy.

Properly implemented watermarking won't be affected by the recompression.  It
may not be as clear to the program as it would be if it was in its old format,
but its still legible.  Since I'm a photographer, I've tested this theory a
bit because of concerns that my black and white photos (which I actually sell
for money) might be stolen off of our gallery site.  You'd have to badly
degrade the quality in order to completely destroy the watermarks completely,
as long as you implemented the watermarking correctly in the first place.


-- 
Brian Bruns
The Summit Open Source Development Group
Open Solutions For A Closed World / Anti-Spam Resources
http://www.sosdg.org

The AHBL - http://www.ahbl.org