As a programmer, I’m here to propose some technical solutions to this social problem. It’s so easy! Why hasn’t anyone thought of this before?
I appreciate the self-awareness. :) It’s nice to see some exploration of what it would take to solve this, if we could get to a point where people actually want to solve it.
This focuses mostly on technical measures, and it’s true that design choices make it easier or harder for people to do the right thing. But you’re also up against a culture of “JPEGs are just numbers; you can’t own a number!” and “lolwut imaginary property!” where even embedded watermarks are scrubbed out because it’s all about the purity of the message or some shit.
Ironically, a great deal of images on Twitter and Tumblr and Facebook don’t seem to be indexed by Google’s reverse image search, so if one of those is the original source (and a lot of people use Tumblr as a primary art gallery!), you’re out of luck.
I’m only part of the way through the article, but I’d just like to mention that I sometimes have better results with TinEye, the original reverse image search engine. Bing and Yandex also have there own versions, ImageRaider exists as a sort of reverse image meta-search engine, and KarmaDecay, IQDB, and SauceNAO serve their own niches. Google isn’t the only option.
…Okay, back from reading the rest. On the issue of resharing/metadata stripping, Blizzard at one point hid invisible watermarks in screenshots which identified the player who took them. I believe similar steganographic technologies are employed for IP management, anti-piracy, etc; “digital watermarking” or “image digital signatures” would be the right keywords to search here.
The perverse case is, of course, when minor editing/cropping/color-correction/remixing of the image has occurred. How do we track everyone who has touched the image to give them credit?
Something like IPFS or some other distributed versioning system could be helpful.
I appreciate the self-awareness. :) It’s nice to see some exploration of what it would take to solve this, if we could get to a point where people actually want to solve it.
This focuses mostly on technical measures, and it’s true that design choices make it easier or harder for people to do the right thing. But you’re also up against a culture of “JPEGs are just numbers; you can’t own a number!” and “lolwut imaginary property!” where even embedded watermarks are scrubbed out because it’s all about the purity of the message or some shit.
I’m only part of the way through the article, but I’d just like to mention that I sometimes have better results with TinEye, the original reverse image search engine. Bing and Yandex also have there own versions, ImageRaider exists as a sort of reverse image meta-search engine, and KarmaDecay, IQDB, and SauceNAO serve their own niches. Google isn’t the only option.
…Okay, back from reading the rest. On the issue of resharing/metadata stripping, Blizzard at one point hid invisible watermarks in screenshots which identified the player who took them. I believe similar steganographic technologies are employed for IP management, anti-piracy, etc; “digital watermarking” or “image digital signatures” would be the right keywords to search here.
The perverse case is, of course, when minor editing/cropping/color-correction/remixing of the image has occurred. How do we track everyone who has touched the image to give them credit?
Something like IPFS or some other distributed versioning system could be helpful.