World Intellectual Property Day - Free Offer For Photographers

[ciarak]

Great opportunity for photographers:

To celebrate World Intellectual Property Day on April 26th, Digiprove
are offering everyone who signs up between April 23rd and April 26th
100 free credits! Protect your intellectual property - sign up now on
www.digiprove.com.

[Sime]

ciarak, how does digiprove work and why is it better than other solutions? - how does it stop people from using your photo without consent?

Sime

[ciarak]

Hi Sime,

Thanks for your reply. Digiprove uses digital fingerprinting technology to calculate a unique digital fingerprint for each file you digiprove. When you digiprove a file, you receive a time stamped Digiprove Certificate via email, and we keep one on file also - this certificate provides indisputable proof that you were in possession of the file at that moment in time.

What sets Digiprove apart from other solutions is that it's the only solution that does not require you to upload your files, therefore providing complete confidentiality. Moreover, Digiprove is very quick, easy to use and cheap - you can Digiprove an entire zipped file of images (theoretically you could put your entire career's worth of images in here), with just 1 credit, which costs as little as $1, and with the click of a button. At the moment you can get 100 credits free when you register (our basic account is free to sign up for so we're not asking you to spend any money to get these credits) - imagine how much Digiproving you could do with that!

Regarding your last question, Digiprove does not stop people from using your images without your consent. However, it ensures that if you do find that someone is using your image, you can be sure that you can prove that the image is your intellectual property without any element of doubt. The best way to demonstrate this is with an example. The link below will take you to a News Article on www.digiprove.com describing how Irish photographer Trevor Hart reaped the benefits of Digiproving his images.

http://www.digiprove.com/Photographe...ownership.aspx

[OsmosisStudios]

Sounds to me like anyone could do this to any image and claim it as their own.

fishy fishy.

[jprime84]

So you just give people an MD5 hash of their file? What happens if someone crops it or otherwise edits it and then reposts a file of a different size?

[dakwegmo]

Originally Posted by jprime84

So you just give people an MD5 hash of their file? What happens if someone crops it or otherwise edits it and then reposts a file of a different size?

Or changes the meta information on the file to show a creation date earlier than the digiprove registration date?

[rediguana]

Originally Posted by ciarak

However, it ensures that if you do find that someone is using your image, you can be sure that you can prove that the image is your intellectual property without any element of doubt.

Surely it will only prove that you held a certain file at a certain point in time? You still have to prove that an infringing image is yours, and this may be difficult if it has been significantly manipulated in any way from the original.

And how do you prove to a third party that that was actually the time at which it was signed? The hardest part is getting a trustworthy and verifiable timestamp.

It sounds like nothing more than digitally signing a hash of the content. Not really sure how you can patent that as that has been a fundamental aspect of public key cryptography, I think I first read about it in Bruce Schneiers Applied Cryptography (which has been around a long time now, second ed. was published in 1996).

Surely a pool of likeminded geeky photographers could achieve the same thing by hashing an image, and then sending the image and hash to friends with PGP to view and sign. You could conceivably have multiple friends sign the hash to build a more robust signing (e.g. the more people that sign, the harder it is to disprove).

[jdepould]

How is it better than being the only person in possession of the NEF (or CR2 or whatever)?

[Sime]

Originally Posted by jdepould

How is it better than being the only person in possession of the NEF (or CR2 or whatever)?

JDP - very good point. I like companies that try to help protect people, but I think this one is all to easy to get around?

Sime

[dakwegmo]

In the US, you can prove you own an image by registering it with the US copyright office. It's not free, but should you ever need to prove you own an image, there's really no better evidence. Also, if you end up going to court, with a properly registered copyright you can sue for infringement, and not just actual damages.