Making It Easy To Choose But Harder To Lose Images Making It Easy To Choose But Harder To Lose Images
by Richard Baker-Moore
Nick Gould is a man with a mission. As the publisher of the well-known Contact directories, visual source books and CDs, uppermost in his mind is the need to promote the very special talents of a select group of photographers, illustrators and designers whose images feature in his publications. His standards are very high and Contact's success is due to putting consistently high quality portfolios of clients work in the hands of thousands of influential artbuyers world-wide. When it comes to quality, Nick is not someone who is prepared to compromise.
In pursuit of these high standards, Contact's English and Hong Kong production teams go to great lengths to reproduce their clients' images at the highest possible quality both in the books and on the CDs. Unfortunately, the downside of delivering such high quality means that some directory users are tempted to use these images, without permission, for visuals, dummies and, sometimes, even for final use.
Since the arrival of powerful desktop computers, in-house scanning and colour copiers, the creative community has become acutely aware of how easy it is for others to copy their work. The widespread availability of this new technology, when combined with the increasingly cavalier attitude towards copyright abuse shown by the media and publishing industries, is perceived as contributing to a significant increase in the incidence of image piracy. When it comes to the Internet, very many creative professionals believe it to be a thoroughly lawless medium and, consequently, a very risky place to show one's work.
When you take a look at Contact's publications you become very aware of Nick's stance on copyright. Copyright abuse is spreading - unless you stop it - it could destroy the industry! His statement in the introduction speaks volumes.
With increasingly anxious clients concerned that their images and graphics would be pirated, Contact wanted to make sure that their clients' work was well protected and that users of their source books and CDs would be more inclined to comply with the copyright laws. After a series of trials in 1997, Nick took the plunge and decided to invest in state of the art SureSign digital fingerprinting technology from Signum Technologies.
This British company, based in Cheltenham, is the pioneer of digital fingerprinting. For those not familiar with this technology, it is a very clever way of uniquely identifying digital data and is being increasingly used for copyright protection applications by content providers such as stock photo libraries, electronic publishers, photographers and illustrators. In the case of digital images, Signum's various software products process digital image files, making minute changes to the value of each pixel in the image, in a complex mathematically derived pattern.
Reassuringly though, the modifications made to the image data by the SureSign writing software, are so subtle so as to be totally invisible to the human eye. These hidden messages, called fingerprints (sometimes known as invisible watermarks), can only be detected by software tools that, when run over an image file, will reveal codes to uniquely identify the creator and their image. Fingerprinted images used in print or electronic media look no different to any other image.
Using SureSign Pro (now superseded by SureSign Server), a high volume, batch processing application for embedding fingerprints, Nick's team have fingerprinted many hundreds of scanned image files for the 1998 editions of Contact Photographers, Contact Illustrators and on the Contact 14 CD. More recently, Contact has extended SureSign protection to the Internet and images carried on the are now fingerprinted too.
Nick says that, in his opinion, one of the most useful features of SureSign is the ability to detect and read fingerprints from printed media. In this regard, the Contact team has played a pioneering role in the technique of scanning printed media and recovering fingerprint data. Their experience has been a welcome contribution in the development of new Signum software applications, for use with hard copy media, which will be launched later this year.
Contact now considers that, even if someone "lifts" an image and reproduces it illegally in print, there is every chance that the hidden data will provide damning evidence of the unlawful act. Nick is quite emphatic that he will not hesitate to pursue all copyright infringements - having this new "witness" technology from Signum ensures that potential copyright thieves will certainly think twice before stealing an image from Contact.
Contact can be contacted at: +44 (0) 1372 459559