The reason is that the copyright realities of the Web for an individual photographer (or any visual artist for that matter) are pretty grim. Images get passed around a lot, attribution is routinely lost and there isn’t terribly much hat an artist can do.

However, as I talked about in my recent copyright webinar, there are things that photographers can and should do to protect their work online. Unfortunately, most of those steps need to be taken before an image is placed online but they are all steps that, with a bit of planning and work, can make the situation online much less grim.

So here are a few tips for photographers to help keep themselves sane when navigating the world of copyright online.

1. Never Release a Pic Without a Watermark

No picture should leave your computer without a visible watermark on it. Ever. You have to operate under the assumption that your images will be lifted at some point and do your best to make sure that the attribution for them is carried wherever they go. Unfortunately, few people check metadata, which is easily stripped regardless, and a visible watermark is simply the best protection.

The key, however, is to find a balance between noticeability and interference. This is a tough balance to strike, but can be done with enough work.

2. Don’t Forget the Metadata

As true as it is that metadata, whether EXIF or IPTC, might be stripped out, it might not. Don’t forget to ensure that every photo you put online has this data attached to it. This should, at the very least, include copyright and author information, enough to verify that the image is yours if needed and make it easy for someone interested in the photo to trace it back to you.

3. License and License Well

No matter what the terms of use of your images are under, it’s important to make their license clear and put it on every page of your site. With Google, visitors don’t come in through the front door and they won’t click to read your dedicated license page. Make the terms plain and clear and in a place where someone who just stumbled across the image will see it. The odds of the license being followed go up dramatically when it’s clear and visible.

Also, be sure to avoid both industry and legal jargon as they only serve to confuse further.

4. Search for Your Images Regularly

You most likely know what your most popular images are and it makes sense to see where they are being used. For quick searches you can use an image search engine such as Tineye. If you want a more complete solution but are on a budget you can use ImageRights (previous coverage) or SignMyImage (previous coverage).

For a more advanced system, considering either Digimarc (previous coverage) or Picscout (previous coverage).

The main thing though is to use these tools first and foremost to understand how your images are being used and then make decisions about if and how to respond.

5. Focus on Bad Actors

As you start exploring how others are using your content, you’ll likely find that not everyone is acting in bad faith or even causing any harm.

If you take a firm hand with those who are just trying to let others know about your work, are making uses of your content that don’t affect your bottom line or generally not hurting you at all, you’ll likely do much more harm than good.

In short, use common sense when approaching those who are using your content and respond appropriately. Understand that a lot of people aren’t aware of how copyright works on the Web and, as a copyright holder, you have a chance to be an ambassador.

6. Register Your Works

This one should go without saying, but regularly and consistently register your works with the U.S. Copyright Office, especially if you are in the United States or are dealing with infringement in the U.S. Failure to register, especially for a professional, can be a very costly mistake.

7. Keep Putting Out High-Quality Content

Finally, the best protection against piracy is to be ahead of it. If you’re putting out high-quality work on a regular basis, the infringers and others who might want to claim to be you will always be several works behind. Keep honing your craft and putting out newer, better works, you’ll likely find that the impact infringers have is much less.

Bottom Line

In the end, every photographer is in a different copyright situation online. The nature of the work, their business model and their online presence creates a very unique situation that only applies to them.

This is a big part of why every photographer (or artist of any variety) needs to take a look at their situation, the realities of the Web and understand what combination of business model, tracking, licensing and enforcement is needed to get the most from their work.

In short, what works for one photographer won’t work for another, a big part of why it’s difficult to come up with seven tips that work across the board.

Still, these are all steps that every photographer can and should take to stay on top of the very difficult climate online right now. They can each easily save you a lot of headache down the road.

When people talk about content detection, they are usually putting it into some copyright-related context. Whether it is YouTube’s content ID system, image matching for tracking plagiarists/preventing orphans or simple duplicate text searching to track violators of their license, most people think of content detection as a means to track and stop copyright violations.

Sadly, this site too is guilty of that. However, I want to take time today to highlight one of the more important uses of content detection, audience analytics.

Most bloggers put some kind of analytics on their site to track visitors, referrals, etc. But if their revenue doesn’t come from online ads, it is more about understanding your audience than it is tracking actual page views. The statistics themselves are just a means to an end.

However, there is a very good chance that a significant portion of your audience is actually on other sites. But unless you track your content, you may never be aware of it.

Every Site is Different

Last year content tracking service Attributor announced the results of its TrueAudience study. It found, for the publishers that it checked, that the off-site audience was 1 and a half times greater than the audience on the site itself. This meant that, for every two people reading the content on the publisher’s site, three were seeing it elsewhere.

Since the Attributor study focused more on larger publishers, who will likely have higher levels of copying, the results will obviously not be that dramatic for smaller bloggers. However, virtually everyone who publishes to the Web will see some copying and, through that, will have some of their audience on other sites.

Ignoring this is like telling your statistics program to ignore every X visitor without any understanding of what number X is. If you want to know your audience, you have to go where they are.

Given the wide range of sites and the different situations they are in, it is impossible to even offer good estimates without at least getting some facts.

Referrals and Linkbacks

To be certain, you can track some of this with your existing tools. Referrals will alert you to when someone visits your site from another page and trackbacks/pingbacks will alert you instantly when someone has linked to your content.

However, there are several problems with these. Referrals are limited to when people actually click links. This requires both the site to link to you and a user to actually click the link. Given that the vast majority of visitors don’t click referral links, it could never actually happen, even with attributed uses. Also, referrals also track sites that simply link without using any content, making it a challenge to find actual audience members on other sites.

Though trackbacks and pingbacks don’t require anyone to click the link, they also focus mostly on sites that simply link to your blog. Furthermore, there is a huge issue with spam and many sites that duplicate your content may be filtered out, correctly or incorrectly, as such.

These tools are powerful, but they are not actual substitutes for following your content on the Web.

Getting Started

If you’re new to the idea of tracking your content, meaning you probably aren’t a regular reader of this site, here are a few suggestions to get you started.

1. FairShare: A free service provided by content tracking company Attributor, FairShare subscribes to your RSS feed and publishes a private one for you that tracks where it finds your content. Very useful for sites with a low-to-moderate level of copying.
2. Tineye: Though somewhat limited, Tineye is the best visual search engine available and definitely the best free search. Great for visual artists to find how their work is being used.
3. Plagium: If you have static content and can’t use FairShare, Plagium is a good alternative. Receive weekly alerts of new matches for free, works like a hybrid between Google Alerts and free Copyscape, other tools well worth looking into.

These are all great, free services that you can use to track your content and get a slightly better understanding of your audience.

Bottom Line

When I was running a personal literature site, I was proud of my traffic stats but was stunned to find out that my audience off the site was many times larger than it was on my site. Much of the use was legitimate, including use in compilations and online magazines, but much of it was plagiarism. Using this information, I reached out and encouraged legitimate use, even participating in sites and discussions that properly used my content, and decided to tackle the plagiarists.

The system worked very well for me. It let me meet many people and reach out to a whole new group of people. It also let me convert some cases of mistaken identity into legitimate uses and stop plagiarists by the hundred.

Though I eventually abandoned my site, there is no doubt that tracking my content helped me expand my audience and my understanding of it. These two things are at least as valuable, if not more so, than the copyright uses for many bloggers and smaller publishers.

Some time ago I predicted that image matching technology would become both cheaper and more effective, making it possible to search for duplicate or near-duplicate images the same way that writers do with text while keeping the price affordable. Tineye was, and remains, a major step in the right direction on that front but its limited database, about 1.2 billion has hindered its ability to be comprehensive (Facebook, Photobucket and Flickr alone combine for over 18 billion images).

Corrigon, however, hopes to bring something new to this field. According to them, they’ve developed new technology that makes it faster and cheaper to search for copies of images, that will not only enable them to launch a service targeted at individuals later this year, but provide results in near-realtime.

I recently sat down with Corrigon’s CEO, Avinoam Omer and CTO Einav Itamar to talk about their service and their future plans. They gave me a demo of the product and showed me some of its promising new features.

What Corrigon Does

What Corrigon does is similar to the services that stock photo agencies have been using for some time. Users provide a collection of images that are then put into a database. The service then crawls the Web, looking for matching images.

What makes Corrigon unusual is that it doesn’t store the images, but rather, fingerprints them and compares the fingerprint against other matches it finds on the Web. This is very similar to what C-registry.us is doing with its matching technology. However, where C-Registry is more geared toward preventing works from becoming orphans, Corrigon is more about image search (though C-Registry has added image search)

The advantage of this system is simple. By not having to store the images or search against them, Corrigon needs much less space and processing power. This both takes less resources, thus cutting costs, and speeds up the process.

Though I was unable to take screenshots of the demo of since corrigon asked me to keep the identities the image owners secret, the matching seemed to be very near realtime Several of the matches were for stories posted that same day and new ones seemed to be constantly discovered. Though not quite realtime in the sense that Twitter or Facebook provide realtime search, it was definitely much faster than similar services, which often take days or weeks to find results.

In the demo provided me, this was especially well-used in tracking uses of images on news sites, blogs, etc.

As for the matching itself, it seemed to be very solid. The examples on the public site involving the mona lisa are good examples of the flexibility of the service. It was able to detect matches where the copy had been used in a package (with writing over it) modified to make a new image, etc. Though very interesting, it seemed to mirror closely what other services, including Tineye and C-Registry have been able to do in that area.

However, the real selling point for the service seems to be speed and price, something they are making a major play on.

Future Plans

Though Corrigon is currently targeting larger companies, it is planning to offer a solution to smaller users sometime later this year, likely in the 3rd quarter. Though there isn’t much to be certain about pricing, they are also planning on introducing a resolution system that helps resolve cases of copyright infringement, either by obtaining licensing from users or seeking removal of the content, depending on the needs of the user.

Needless to say that many of the plans are unsettled as of yet, but this is clearly a market that they plan on targeting soon.

Some Concerns and a Request for Help

The biggest concern I have is that, without an actual analysis, I can’t say exactly how comprehensive or accurate the matching is. The samples and demo I viewed were impressive, but how that translates into the real world is hard to say. So, while I am impressed, I am cautious as well.

Since I am not a visual artist and do not have a body of work to test the system with, I’m limited in what I can do. However, I am getting in touch with photoraphers and other artists I know to see they would be interested in having their work used for at least a limited test, mostly to give Corrigon feedback but also let me know how effective the system is.

If you think you might be a good candidate, namely a smaller artist with a large amount of reuse of their work, please let me know. I can not make any promises but would like to hear from you.

Bottom Line

There’s little doubt that Corrigon shows a great deal of promise in this field. All that remains to be seen is how that promise translates to real-world application.

However, Corrigon is not the only company entering this market. Another is preparing to drop its prices and reach out more to individual blogers and artists with an improved technology.

I’ll have a write up on their efforts closer in to their launch.

The main thing is that, when you look at the bigger picture, you see services such as Tineye, C-Registry, Corrigon and others bringing image matching to the masses. This has a huge impact on how visual artists track their works and also works to mitigate the orphan works issue.

Hopefully we’ll soon be reaching a point where artists of all stripes can find their content as easily and as cheaply as writers do today. This will have a profound impact on both the protection of copyrighted images, but also in empowering the legal use of said images through proper licensing and a sheer understanding of how one’s works are used across the Web.

It will be a better world for artists, that much is certain.

Though this is good news in that it will improve the effectiveness of image search techniques, such as the digital fingerprint method I described on the Blog Herald, it could also mean an increase in image spam blogging on the Blogspot service.

Simply put, since image searches have increased in popularity but remain less competitive than text ones, some spammers have seized upon it as a way to improve the effectiveness of existing spam operations by adding images to the text in hopes that they get picked up.

However, Blogspot spam has remained relatively void of such images, largely because it wasn’t being indexed. However, that will likely start to change now.

Though this is great news overall, every silver lining has a cloud. Photographers should use this tool to their advantage but also be more on guard because of it.

This comes after Cybele, along with others, noticed that the site appeared to violating Flickr’s terms of use and posted about it in the Flickr forum.

In the replies to Cybele’s post, a Flickr staff member named “Kevin” posted a comment on Saturday clarifying that FeelImage was not using Flickr’s API but was instead doing a simple tag search. He closed his comment by saying that “We’ll try and put the kibbosh on them shortly.”

It appears that, whatever action Flickr took, was effective as results on FeelImage are completely devoid of Flickr results and are instead largely limited to results from Japanese photo-sharing site Zorg.

FeelImage, for their part, is on vacation until the 19th of this month but did post a brief statement on their blog asking anyone who does not want their photo displayed on the site to email them.

Though it is sad that FeelImage has been crippled so badly. especially just after obtaining such broad press exposure, any such search engine is going to have to follow the rules and standard practices in regards to indexing content and it appears that FeelImage was not.

Hopefully, in time, they can fix their system and repair the relationship with the offended Flickr users. It would be nice to have this technology available, but not if it creates more copyright issues than it resolves, as was the case under the old system.

Though it might seem like something of a novelty, the ability for users to search for “purple flower” or “red car” might have an unintended side effect, enabling photographers and artists to better search for copies of their work online.

With most current photo searche engines based solely upon tagging and words around the image, there are very few techniques to effectively search for duplicates of an image on the Web. Searching for the file name, for example, is one possibility, but it is easily defeated by simply renaming the file before re-uploading it.

Though FeelImage, in its current incarnation, is only a minor step forward, it is already being used by some artists, including the Ripped Art Task Force, to track down copied images.

Other visual artists may find it just as useful.

Usage

The idea behind using FeelImage is pretty straightforward. If you have an image that is often stolen or you suspect might be, simply search for the color (or time) and a description of what is in the image. FeelImage, in a few moments, will pull up a list of photos similar to the one you describe. From there, it is easy to browse and look for any exact copies of your image.

It is important to note though that, when using FeelImage, that the color detection is automated and, thus, not perfect. If you have a picture of a red car that is set against a blue sky, FeelImage will likely read most of the image as being blue and it might not show up well on a search for “Red Car” but will show up higher on “Blue Car”.

Furthermore, FeelImage works best with photos and images that are of one subject and, for the most part, one color. The more complicated the image is, the less likely FeelImage will accurately describe it.

Of course, these are not FeelImage’s only limitations. The service is very new and it is important to be aware that it is still a work in progress. Thus, its search comes with a few caveats.

Limitations

FeelImage, as its logo indicates, is only an alpha release. It is not feature complete and has many bugs in it.

The greatest limitation is that FeelImage only searches for photos on three photo services, Photozou, Zorg and Flickr.

Though Flickr is a very popular photo hosting service and is used to display images on many different sites, it is not the only image hosting service on the Web by any stretch. Photos hosted by Imagecshack, Photobucket and others will go undetected.

Second, the object information seems to be based upon the tags that the user supplies with the photos. Though the color detection seems to work automatically, perhaps to a fault, FeelImage has to look at the tags to determine what it is a photo of. Though creating a system to do that automatically would be virtually impossible, the reliance on user-submitted input, in this case a plagiarist, is a definite weakness.

Finally, since the service is still in a pre-release phase, the results are not as accurate as they could be. It is clear that the developers are still working on the software that runs the search engine as, in some searches, the first few pages of results are almost completely irrelevant. Some searches, however, work better than others and it is important to play around with modified searches to see what results you get.

Still, these limitations should not stop artists from at least experimenting with FeelImage. Not only can it be used to detect plagiarism, but its intended use, finding similar images based upon color and time, is a very interesting feature that produces some unexpected results.

It is a great tool and it will be interesting to see how it grows.

Conclusions

Image plagiarism is easily the hardest to detect. Though tools are available to monitor such infringements, they are generally out of the reach of your average blogger or amateur artist.

FeelImage represents only a small step forward in detecting image plagiarism but it is an important one. It finally gets through the use of text and tags and looks into the image itself for clues. This can help narrow down the search results and increase the likelihood that the image you want is at the top of the results.

Despite its severe limitations, at least at this time, it is an important site for artists, photographers and others who post images to be aware of.

Not only is it a powerful tool today, but it could easily grow into something much greater and provide an even bigger boost to artists in the future. It will definitely be a service to follow.