Adding Copyright Information
As mentioned elsewhere, I’m working on a website for David Ward that will also include a gallery. I’m also working on a generic fine art gallery for a colleague. During this process, the inevitable conversation about protecting images came up, as mentioned in a previous post. Over the last couple of days, I’ve worked on a plug-in for the image processing module of the website that will allow some extra flexibility in protecting images. This topic was discussed to death on The Online Photographer website. His conclusion was very close to mine and that is that, without completeley disfigouring your photograph, you can’t stop people using it illegally unless you remove it from the internet completely. So, if you want to show your pictures, it’s more important to make people aware that they are copyright and that the user should license them for use. My solution to this is to write a plug-in that appends a panel below a photograph if it is displayed above a certain size. This panel can have a background colour to match the website and so it won’t look like part of the photograph until someone decides to save it or use the photograph out of context. The information in the bottom panel should provide the copyright mark and information on how to contact the photographer and a link to the website where prominent licensing information can be found.
I’m also thinking about providing an extra feature for registered users so that they can view a higher resolution, better quality version of the photograph if they have registered their name and email address. I’ve added the ability to add a watermark if someone really wants one, but I hope they don’t.
