[open-science] Annotating Open Images with licence and authorship to prevent copyfraud

Tue Aug 6 14:33:12 UTC 2013

On Tue, Aug 6, 2013 at 3:57 PM, Peter Murray-Rust <pm286 at cam.ac.uk> wrote:
> it is also fragile - easily removed either deliberately or by copy/paste and
> otehr format conversions

Just 2 cents.

Watermarks in the photos are also easily removed (search for
"watermark removal" - there are plenty of tools with impressive
capabilities). All easy ways to protect/stamp/mark digital content are
fragile. That's why I tend to agree with Michael Nielsen who argued
for DRM long time ago
http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/intellectual-property-automated-contracts-and-the-free-flow-of-information/

Without going into deep discussion on the tradeoffs of different
options, I have a small suggestion, assuming the watermarking idea is
going to take off. Embedded metadata allows to identify
incompatibilities (for example: identification that certain two images
are incompatible with each other when used together in a derivative
work) in an automated fashion. Your watermarked images could be used
in the same way, _provided_ the watermark is placed in a such way that
OCR tools could get the license information back.

Best wishes
PS