So it looks as if anyone can use your photographs from the web as long as they have done a "diligent search" where diligent means "thirty seconds, google didn't come up with anything so I will use the picture"
Until the internet changes are made to protect photos, there is no way to stop people from using them. People will do what they want regardless of what they know to be right. The only way to safeguard anything is to not post anywhere ever. Ok, I'm in a cynical mood today but really if there is no information that is carried with a photo, it belongs to no one and cannot be traced back to the owner in 99% of the photos.
It is worrying,i always upload a little image if they were to do anything i think they would manage a 6x4 print.
I had a ladybird pic stolen last yr & the person said it was their pic.Long story short every one of her pics were stolen & she closed her site.
The EXIF data is always with the digital image, if you kept it there. I am not convinced watermarks will be the solution. I like the idea of posting images in a size and resolution that makes them unusable for other things.
@steampowered Where, even in that badly-researched article, does it say that a diligent search means 'thirty seconds, google didn't come up with anything so I will use the picture'?
From what I've seen from actually reading the bill and supporting documents (something I suspect that most of the press reporting on this issue haven't bothered to do), organisations will be accredited the right to do diligent searches and will undergo random sampling of the quality of their searches to ensure that they are, in fact, diligent. Individuals or organisations who do not do sufficiently regular checking of orphaned works will have all of their diligent searches checked for diligency. While the requirements for diligency have yet to be set out, an estimate of 3.5 hours to attempt to diligently determine the origin of a photograph has been given as reasonable by the BBC.
This is an important bill and I'm not sure if I support it or not at the moment, but it's certainly not as clear cut a 'bad thing' in my mind as articles like that one and the ridiculous Register diatribe suggest.
@chapjohn No it's not. There is no EXIF data in the images that are displayed here, on Facebook, on Flickr (except for original size which few people make available), on 500px, or on (to the best of my knowledge) any other major photo-sharing site, regardless of whether the EXIF data was present when you uploaded it.
Not that I like to disagree with your extensive knowledge Alexis, but, Flickr does preserve all EXIF data. On the right of the image, where it shows Exposure, Aperture etc. click on that to display full EXIF data. Unless the user has disabled the viewing of it in their settings.
I work for a major photographic manufacturer - it's easy to edit EXIF data when you know how. You won't get any protection from that.
Plagiarism is the price we pay for digital technolgies - just like phone hacking, computer viruses, hidden cameras and lots of other things, although image theft has been around for a lot longer than digital cameras. The best you can do is make it a bit more difficult. You won't stop it.
@jase_again Flickr displays the EXIF data that was present when the file was uploaded on the page with the image. It does not keep the EXIF data embedded in the image. Once the EXIF data has been stripped from the image it is no longer associated with the image, it may merely be displayed near the image if you happen to find the image at the original source -- and if you find the image at the original source then you also typically find the owner.
In this case, if you find the photo on a Flickr page, then it clearly isn't orphaned by any definition -- the owner is quite clearly identified as the Flickr account holder (assuming the image hasn't been stolen), so the presence or lack of EXIF data in the actual image is irrelevant. The point of keeping the EXIF data in the *image*, not on the associated page, is so that when the image alone is found, it can still be identified.
Here is the image URL of one of your recent Flickr uploads:
That image will have been cached by various online sources and can be found in a number of ways. Copies of it will still exist somewhere online even if you delete your Flickr account. There is no EXIF data embedded in that image -- so you cannot use EXIF data to identify the person who created that photo.
Similarly, some blogger may steal the image from Flickr and upload it under another filename. The blog goes away (as they almost all do) but the image is still online and this time doesn't even have the original filename to help determine ownership. The fact that the EXIF data was once displayed somewhere near the image has long since passed into irrelevancy. If the EXIF data is stripped from the image on upload, as it is with all the services I mentioned, the image will almost certainly end up online at some point in the future in a place which did not bother to take the EXIF data with it.
Here is the grand sum of the EXIF data *embedded* in your photograph uploaded to Flickr:
@pistonbroke That's like saying that because it's easy to break the window, you shouldn't lock your car.
Yes, of course EXIF data can be edited if someone wants to do that, but the person who does that is already going to steal your photo and use it for free. This law does not allow free use of your photographs -- the person using the photograph still has to pay a usage fee, they just have to pay it to the government for you to claim rather than to you directly (because they are unable to identify you).
If the EXIF data is present in a photo someone wants to use, and that EXIF data is set correctly, then in 99% of cases it provides a simple way for the person who wants to use the photo to get in touch with the photo's author. Undoubtedly, there is going to be someone, somewhere who gets in touch with the author, finds they refuse to license the image, strips the EXIF data and then attempts to claim that it is an orphaned image. But just because a small minority are going to do that doesn't mean that the whole idea of keeping EXIF data embedded in images is completely without value.
@jase_again Sorry, didn't mean to come across as grumpy :) It is absolutely true that Flickr does show the EXIF data when you view the photo on a Flickr page (and very useful it is too), I was just trying to explain why the stripping of the data from the image itself is a bad thing in the case of attempting to determine ownership of a potentially-orphaned image on the Interweb :)
@lynnb Unfortunately that's something that the photo sharing sites need to implement, and is nothing we can control (other than moving to a site that doesn't strip EXIF data as part of their processing, or petitioning them to alter their behaviour).
This discussion comes up on Flickr reasonably often, and the most commonly-stated reasons by Flickr staff for this EXIF stripping are:
1. File size constraints -- while EXIF data is typically quite small, it can actually be used to store data of almost any size -- you could embed a word document in there if you knew what you were doing. If you are going to retain all EXIF data in even the smallest images, and a photo has a lot of EXIF data, it could quite feasibly make a thumbnail-sized image 10 times larger, which both impacts storage costs (for the photo sharing site) and page load times for viewers.
2. Privacy concerns -- EXIF data from mobile phones, and more and more cameras, often contains data which many would consider private, and that the average person probably doesn't realise is present at all, and wouldn't be aware how to remove -- for example, most mobile phones will at least provide the option of embedding the GPS location of any photograph taken. (It's believed that GPS data embedded in the EXIF of a mobile phone photograph revealed the location of a fugitive last year).
Is is much simpler to by default remove the EXIF data and (in the case of Flickr) give the user an option of displaying it next to the photo if they want, than having to deal with the complaints when users realise that the exact location of a photo they posted is visible to anyone who sees it.
While both of these arguments have strong merit, I don't believe that a simple and complete stripping of EXIF data, as all of these sites currently do, is the correct way to do it. While EXIF headers are relatively badly defined, there are a number of headers which support only text and are designed for the use of identifying the author -- the ones that my photographs have filled in are called 'artist', 'owner name', 'creator', 'rights', 'copyright' and 'byline'. All of these are set to my name in all photographs that I save and upload.
It seems to me that, while there are reasonable arguments against keeping all EXIF data, keeping the contents of these fields in all versions of a file would add extremely little space, and would be unlikely to contain information which the photographer didn't want to display. (In order to get this information into the photo, I need to set the copyright flag in my camera's settings, so it seems a reasonable assumption that if you set this to your name or website address, you are happy with that data being published).
It should be noted that this is exactly what a lot of stock photography agencies and news agencies already do. Here is a link to the EXIF data for a photo by the Associated Press:
You can see that this contains barely any more information than the link I posted for Jase's Flickr photo, but it does include the following tag:
Copyright: AP2013
And that is enough to allow anyone who finds that photo 'orphaned' to be able to identify the copyright holder without having to do any 'diligent searching' whatsoever.
Edit: On similar lines, here is the data that Getty embed in my stock photographs.
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I had a ladybird pic stolen last yr & the person said it was their pic.Long story short every one of her pics were stolen & she closed her site.
From what I've seen from actually reading the bill and supporting documents (something I suspect that most of the press reporting on this issue haven't bothered to do), organisations will be accredited the right to do diligent searches and will undergo random sampling of the quality of their searches to ensure that they are, in fact, diligent. Individuals or organisations who do not do sufficiently regular checking of orphaned works will have all of their diligent searches checked for diligency. While the requirements for diligency have yet to be set out, an estimate of 3.5 hours to attempt to diligently determine the origin of a photograph has been given as reasonable by the BBC.
This is an important bill and I'm not sure if I support it or not at the moment, but it's certainly not as clear cut a 'bad thing' in my mind as articles like that one and the ridiculous Register diatribe suggest.
@spirrowshoot
Message received.
@abirkill
Plagiarism is the price we pay for digital technolgies - just like phone hacking, computer viruses, hidden cameras and lots of other things, although image theft has been around for a lot longer than digital cameras. The best you can do is make it a bit more difficult. You won't stop it.
In this case, if you find the photo on a Flickr page, then it clearly isn't orphaned by any definition -- the owner is quite clearly identified as the Flickr account holder (assuming the image hasn't been stolen), so the presence or lack of EXIF data in the actual image is irrelevant. The point of keeping the EXIF data in the *image*, not on the associated page, is so that when the image alone is found, it can still be identified.
Here is the image URL of one of your recent Flickr uploads:
http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8262/8686502723_164d2acde4_b.jpg
That image will have been cached by various online sources and can be found in a number of ways. Copies of it will still exist somewhere online even if you delete your Flickr account. There is no EXIF data embedded in that image -- so you cannot use EXIF data to identify the person who created that photo.
Similarly, some blogger may steal the image from Flickr and upload it under another filename. The blog goes away (as they almost all do) but the image is still online and this time doesn't even have the original filename to help determine ownership. The fact that the EXIF data was once displayed somewhere near the image has long since passed into irrelevancy. If the EXIF data is stripped from the image on upload, as it is with all the services I mentioned, the image will almost certainly end up online at some point in the future in a place which did not bother to take the EXIF data with it.
Here is the grand sum of the EXIF data *embedded* in your photograph uploaded to Flickr:
http://regex.info/exif.cgi?imgurl=http%3A%2F%2Ffarm9.staticflickr.com%2F8262%2F8686502723_164d2acde4_b.jpg
If I now upload that to my website under the name 'cool-car.jpg', how does that EXIF data allow someone to determine you took that photograph?
@abirkill
Yes, of course EXIF data can be edited if someone wants to do that, but the person who does that is already going to steal your photo and use it for free. This law does not allow free use of your photographs -- the person using the photograph still has to pay a usage fee, they just have to pay it to the government for you to claim rather than to you directly (because they are unable to identify you).
If the EXIF data is present in a photo someone wants to use, and that EXIF data is set correctly, then in 99% of cases it provides a simple way for the person who wants to use the photo to get in touch with the photo's author. Undoubtedly, there is going to be someone, somewhere who gets in touch with the author, finds they refuse to license the image, strips the EXIF data and then attempts to claim that it is an orphaned image. But just because a small minority are going to do that doesn't mean that the whole idea of keeping EXIF data embedded in images is completely without value.
@abirkill
This discussion comes up on Flickr reasonably often, and the most commonly-stated reasons by Flickr staff for this EXIF stripping are:
1. File size constraints -- while EXIF data is typically quite small, it can actually be used to store data of almost any size -- you could embed a word document in there if you knew what you were doing. If you are going to retain all EXIF data in even the smallest images, and a photo has a lot of EXIF data, it could quite feasibly make a thumbnail-sized image 10 times larger, which both impacts storage costs (for the photo sharing site) and page load times for viewers.
2. Privacy concerns -- EXIF data from mobile phones, and more and more cameras, often contains data which many would consider private, and that the average person probably doesn't realise is present at all, and wouldn't be aware how to remove -- for example, most mobile phones will at least provide the option of embedding the GPS location of any photograph taken. (It's believed that GPS data embedded in the EXIF of a mobile phone photograph revealed the location of a fugitive last year).
Is is much simpler to by default remove the EXIF data and (in the case of Flickr) give the user an option of displaying it next to the photo if they want, than having to deal with the complaints when users realise that the exact location of a photo they posted is visible to anyone who sees it.
While both of these arguments have strong merit, I don't believe that a simple and complete stripping of EXIF data, as all of these sites currently do, is the correct way to do it. While EXIF headers are relatively badly defined, there are a number of headers which support only text and are designed for the use of identifying the author -- the ones that my photographs have filled in are called 'artist', 'owner name', 'creator', 'rights', 'copyright' and 'byline'. All of these are set to my name in all photographs that I save and upload.
It seems to me that, while there are reasonable arguments against keeping all EXIF data, keeping the contents of these fields in all versions of a file would add extremely little space, and would be unlikely to contain information which the photographer didn't want to display. (In order to get this information into the photo, I need to set the copyright flag in my camera's settings, so it seems a reasonable assumption that if you set this to your name or website address, you are happy with that data being published).
It should be noted that this is exactly what a lot of stock photography agencies and news agencies already do. Here is a link to the EXIF data for a photo by the Associated Press:
http://regex.info/exif.cgi?dummy=on&imgurl=http%3A%2F%2Fcdn.theatlantic.com%2Fstatic%2Finfocus%2Fbos041713%2Fb05_75571109.jpg
You can see that this contains barely any more information than the link I posted for Jase's Flickr photo, but it does include the following tag:
Copyright: AP2013
And that is enough to allow anyone who finds that photo 'orphaned' to be able to identify the copyright holder without having to do any 'diligent searching' whatsoever.
Edit: On similar lines, here is the data that Getty embed in my stock photographs.