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

[Peter Murray-Rust]

Thanks




> 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/
>

Thanks for the link. As you may expect I don't agree with present DRM. (It
might be possible to design something different, and in a sense what I am
suggesting is a very weak form of that)

I  can appreciate that removing a watermark may be possible but it takes a
deliberate act. If I send an image to a publisher, marked as CC-BY PMR then
that cannot be removed automatically. And if it is removed manually then
it's a breach of trust and unacceptable in the community. The point is not
that it's sophisticated but that it makes it immediately visually clear
that the image is under someones licence. And since the mark may destroy
information then it may become clear that it has been removed.

The idea of it being visual is that it survives to print and other media,
which DRM will not.



>
> 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.
>

I am welcome to any suggestions! This was a 2 hour hack. Indeed I would
hope that my initial idea would be transformed by the community.

Rephrase it at a higher level:

How can we simply, and unilaterally, add visual and/or metadata information
to images to assert that they are Open and therefore re-usable indefinitely?

P.


-- 
Peter Murray-Rust
Reader in Molecular Informatics
Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry
University of Cambridge
CB2 1EW, UK
+44-1223-763069
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