How to stop copyright theft of images?

Question

Is there s a way for anti theft images? I'm not referring to web sites, what I want is if a JPEG is stolen it cannot be manipulated by the thief, only can be used by the owner.

Answer 1

If you host an image on a website then you're stuck with the possibility that someone can download and save it, duplicate it and distribute it.

Some sites use watermarks to mark sample images and then know who they sell the full size images to. This might allow them some legal recourse if the image starts getting distributed.

In practice though this is almost impossible to protect against.

Hope that helps!

Answer 2

This is not possible as jpeg doesn't have a mean to employ digital rights management. You could protect the file itself, but once somebody else has that file, he can do with it as he likes.

Answer 3

Even if you could come up with a protection scheme on the file itself, if the user can display it they only have to hit print screen to get a copy of the file they can work with. Unless you control the computer used to view the file completely it's not possible.

Answer 4

There's not really any good ways of preventing "theft" or free redistribution of content which you post freely on an accessible web-server.