I would like to preface this question by stating that I do not intend to break any copyright laws. I heard this story third hand ( a friend of my fiance’s). This woman had just gotten the professional photos from her daughter’s wedding. She went to the self service photo copier at Wal-Mart and tried to make a copy. It wouldn’t allow her to do it. She then went back home, took a digital photo of the photo and tried to copy that. That also did not work.
I was wondering if there was something hidden in the photo that can tell the copier that it is copyrighted. I would like to know exactly what it is, but if explaining it to me would allow anyone reading this to easily disable the copyright, don’t post it - just tell me it exists.
There are markings that will be recognised by certain copiers and will cause them to refuse to copy the document. One such pattern is the EURion constellation (although that one only appears on banknotes AFAIK)
This doesn’t pass the sniff test. Although unlikely, I could not positively rule out the possibility that Wal-Mart’s copier could balk if it detected something (I don’t know what) on the photo. It would almost certainly have to be some marking in the paper itself rather than something in the image. But there is no way that a digital camera would refuse to take a picture of anything. Either this is an urban legend or the woman didn’t know what she was doing.
It might just be that the copier at Mall Wart refused to copy the image on the basis of coverage - a full-page colour photo uses a lot of toner compared to the average printed page.
I know that photographs can and do add copy protection to prevent scanning and reprinting. The scan wil be full of crap. The protection mechanism I’v seen would have printed garbage pictures for her. I could see them employing the copier’s protection mechanism to also work for them and plain refude to plint. I’m sure the copiers are quit able to refuse to copy a picture with a complementing patern embeded. I know that walmart has signs up by all copiers and photo stations saying Walmart will not allow copying of copyrighted pictures.
A little while ago they used the copier encoding to stop a counterfeiter. It was the first case in which I and many others heard of it finally being of assistance after all these years of it being implimented.
At Walgreens, they physically look at the pictures to decide if they are copyright protected. Some people just look at the back and if it has a company name on it, it’s a no go. Some attendents will look at the front as well a make a decision based on that. To a point, it’s a compliment when someone refuses to copy a picture YOU took based on them thinking its profesional. Of course it’s also frutrating if you want to copy it and they won’t let you. Or so I hear, that’s never happened to me.
This is slightly off topic, but it’s what I thought the OP was going to refer to, but just recently a publisher got away with simply cropping the copyright and photog name out a picture and using that. This went to court and the person that stole the picture actually won.
What I’m getting at is, was the wedding in Las Vegas? If so, there’s good reason to believe that the pictures were taken by Cashman, which is the Goliath of Vegas wedding photography. And while a small independent photographer may not have access to the latest anti-copying technology, a huge outfit like Cashman almost certainly does.
Take heart, however: if Cashman was the photographer, and you’re patient, you can wait a while and make as many copies as you want. Right after our Vegas wedding, we were offered the full rights to all the pictures (the full-res images on CD and a certificate of copyright) for about $900. We turned them down. About a year and a half later, they were “clearing out their warehouse” and offered us a last chance to buy the full rights for $150. Much more reasonable.
Digimarc would have prevented that - it goes throughout the entire image so it can’t be simply snipped off the edge, and is rather robust - it can survive photocopying, scanning and sometimes it’ll even survive image format chages (eg: TIFF to JPEG)
Is it statistically possible to include the EURion constellation (or something like it) by mere chance? Say, a picture of a girl playing marbles, or a field of flowers?..'cause that’d be cool. Very, very unlikely, but cool.
You can use a flatbed scanner nowadays to scan text and paste it directly into a word document, so the technology for recognizing a copyright watermark is presumably quite available to someone like Fujifilm or Wal mart for use in the photo copier kiosks.
While I could suggest that she simply crop out or cover up the copyright watermark, as an aspiring photographer myself, I’m gonna say the bestest and easiest way to get more copies of the photos is going to be to buy them from the photographer, since that IS how he makes his money. While it may seem like he’s charging a lot (and he probably is), his own costs are also rather high. Even with digital photography, it isn’t cheap to take those photos, just because of the high cost of professional equipment. $2000 for the camera, just to start with, and then he probably needs some standalone flash units, possibly wireless flash triggers so he’s not stringing flash sync cords like WWI razor wire accross the room waiting for someone to trip and drag a flash unit down with them. All the stands for holding everything (since he can, at most, only hold the camera and a small flash, everything else needs stands that can cost a few hundred dollars a piece). He also needs a computer and photo editing software, and some means of storing the photos in case the customer wants to order reprints.
There’s also the time involved in post-production, cropping photos and adjusting colors and fixing blemishes and deciding which pictures to offer up to the customer and which ones to trash, so on so forth.
And of course, all that aside, he still has to make a living, and there’s not necessarily a guarantee of steady work for a photographer like there is for someone working in an office or a store (granted, some pro photographers I’ve met also had day jobs), and hopefully he’s putting enough work into his photos to make them worth the cost.
The photos weren’t taken in Vegas, but they were taken by a professional.
The point of the question was just to find out if such a thing exists. I found it difficult to beleive that a scanner could pick something up that the naked eye couldn’t. If it is a Digimark (which I guess I’m assuming that it is) I could see how it would get transferred to another picture through a camera.
I do want to get ahold of one of these pictures to see for myself. Are they completely invisble to the naked eye? Or, can a person see them if they are looking for them?
I guess I’m just a geek for finding this stuff interesting.
FWIW, I am getting married in less than a year, but my fiance’s cousin is a professional photographer and is doing the photos for our wedding. I don’t think I"ll have to worry about the copyright problems since he said he would do it for the cost of the film and processing.
Pro wedding photographers do not usually copyright their work.
Too much effort and expense. They do take steps however possible to prevent copies being made from their work.
Wedding and other photos are their business and bread and butter.
Making copies is unethithetical even though it is not illegal. In effect it is larceny.
The original 3rdhnd story may be true but it rings like a dried cowpie.
Yes, but the context is important. The reason they won is that they used the photo in a review of the book as an example. The basis for the decision was that you are allowed to quote passages from a copyrighted work for reviews, so it is OK to “quote” a photo.
Now I’m off to read up on Digimark and how it could possibly propagate to a digital photo of the original photo.
Photos are automatically copyrighted by default. So, yeah, it is a copyright offense to make copies without the photographer’s permission (or the photographer’s employer).
For my wedding photos, I asked for a copyright waiver during the bidding process. The place I went with (a big, well-known studio chain) had no problem with it. I guess they probably figured that if I were smart enough to ask, then it wasn’t worth their effort to withhold it from me whilst I was considering spending an otherwise large amount of money with them.
Then you might like this somewhat technical paper (PDF file) on digital watermarking. I always thought digital watermarking only persisted through digital forms of the work but apparently it is still discernible in printed and scanned versions, so the OP story is technically possible.
It wouldn’t have prevented it at all. Nothing about Digimarc keeps me from making a copy. It simply would have allowed the photographer to prove that he owned the image. But that was never a point of contention, and would have made no difference in the lawsuit.
Wrong again. It is positively illegal. It is illegal to take your own copyrighted wedding picture, scan it, and send it in an email to Aunt Dorothy. It is illegal to do what the woman in the OP was trying to do. It has become much harder to enforce now that all the necessary equipment is available in many households.
Slightly off-topic, does possesion of the negatives imply release of copyright? I don’t remember getting a waiver from our wedding photographer, but we’ve got the negs so I assume we can copy away to our hearts content.
Originally Posted by gotpasswords
Digimarc would have prevented that [use of the photo as described in the lawsuit]. . .
In my original statement, I should have said “could” instead of “would.”
It might have helped the photographer prevail - If the printed copy was of good enough copy, they’d have been able to scan it, read the Digimarc code and say “That’s my code number, so it’s my image.” I don’t think it’s quite robust enough to be usable in newspaper-grade printing, though, unless it’s cranked up so high as to be visually obvious.
Other than digital copiers that are programmed to look for digital watermarks, yes, there’s nothing to prevent someone from taking an image and making a photocopy, a scan, or even shooting a copy with a stat camera. Well, nothing other than a sense of ethics.
Sure we do copyright our work. Maybe we don’t register it with the copyright office, but it’s still copyrighted. (However, the amount of damages we can recover is limited to actual damages by the fact the photos aren’t registered.) In fact, the contract all my couples sign spells out exactly what the copyright rules are. I sell the right to reproduce images for personal use along with my wedding packages, because I don’t keep the traditional business model. I however keep copyright on my photos and also have them sign a model release so I could use the pictures for advertising and other commercial purposes. And, yes, it is illegal to copy those photos. In fact, most photo refinishing places (including cheapies like Walgreens and CVS) will not reprint images from my wedding DVDs without seeing the contract which releases the limited copyright to them.