Protecting Artistic Works on the Web

by Geoffrey Meredith

Over time, we've had a number of questions about protecting images of art on the internet. This article attempts to cover a number of issues assocaited with this subject and what makes sense for to do about them.

The Issue

The concern is usually expressed like this: "Can someone steal my images from my website?" Artists are concerned about the use of their works in ways that they have neither control nor knowledge of. By putting digital representations of their works on the internet, they feel a potential lost of control of that work.

The Reality

Unfortunately, the reality is that the only way to absolutely prevent misuse of your artwork online is to not have it on the internet at all. That same line of thinking would also have you not showing your work at galleries or shows because someone might take a picture of the work and misuse that too. All exposure has it's risks. What is important is that you evaluate the potential harm that these risks may represent and do what you can to mitigate the worst of these risks.

So, the task is not to prevent the theft of images but to minimize the chance of theft and to minimize the value of what is taken. All while minimizing the negative impact on the vast majority of the visitors to your website that are there to admire or evaluate your work.

Intellectual Property

As the creator of a work, you automatically have a copyright on that work and have the legal right to control it's use. (Keep in mind that I'm not a lawyer, so don't take this as legal advice.) It's completely up to you as to how you want to use that right. For many, this is a matter of maximizing monetary gain but for others, there are issues of artistic integrity. For instance, you might not want your work used on a cigarette package or in advertising, even if you were paid.

At one extreme, you could choose to avoid showing your work publicly, make people sign non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) before privately showing your work and make purchasers of your work sign an agreement to limit the work's exposure to the public after purchase. I can't image many artist becoming successful this way, (whatever your measure of success) but you could do this. I don't personally know anyone who does this but I can imagine that they exist. For other kinds of copyrighted works, such as computer software, this is a typical model.

On the other extreme, you could put your work out in the public domain and give everyone the right to do what they wanted with it. There are many successful writers, musicians and photographers that do just this.

I expect that most of you reading this will be somewhere between these two extremes. You want to get as much exposure as you can but you want to have some say, hopefully the ultimate say, in how that work is used. You want to make as much money on your efforts without "selling out" in the process.

Maximizing Revenues

The "maximizing revenues" side of this issue is an interesting one that has some very diverse opinions. Most would agree that you need to maximize your profile and exposure, to maximize your revenues. The more people who know about you, the more opportunities there are sell your work and the higher the price you can set. If your "precious commodity" is an original painting, then you want to maximize the price that you get for each work. Freely giving away digital images of that work, especially if you are not trying to directly monetize these images, does not negatively impact on your revenues and should increase the interest in your original work and thus increase your revenues.

So, the question often comes down to what do you want to give away freely and what do you want to control? The act of putting up a website of your works implicitly says that you are willing to give away the viewing of your work, as represented by a particular image, within the context of the specific website. This obviously makes a lot of sense in terms of promoting your art. In doing this, you are also making it possible (but not legal) for someone to take your image and use it for another purpose that you had not approved. Do you even want to prevent this? While not giving permission, sometimes such use can actually help promote you and your work; while those that want to legitimately use your work will still deal with you directly. You may even want to look into Creative Commons licensing of your work that will explicitly allow people to use your works in ways that will benefit you and others but will still provide you some level of rights to control your work.

This is an area that is hotly debated. What is best for any particular copyright holder is not clear but it is something that artists should consider.

Protecting Digital Images

Back to the original question: Assuming that you want to do the most to protect your images from any use other than for viewing on your website, how can this best be done from a technology perspective? The protection mechanism break down into two groups:

  1. prevent access to an image,
  2. make the image undesirable for reuse.

Preventing Access to an Image

The first would seem like the better solution and it would be if it were possible to accomplish this with certainty. The "problem" is that the internet and web technologies were developed with openness in mind. [I put quotes around "problem" because these are the things that made internet what it is today, so it's not a problem in the larger view.] In most cases, images are just files that can be pulled off of a website just like any other resource. Your web browser gets a web page that includes references to the image files that need to be brought onto your computer to complete the page. This fundamental activity provides the "hole" that allows any image to be downloaded by just about anyone. The easiest way to take advantage of this feature is to just right click (control-click on Macs) on an image from within any web browser. This will usually bring up a menu that includes the ability to save the image to the visitor's computer.

The simplest way to fix this it to disable this right-click menu. This has several drawbacks. First you are overriding a fundamental feature of a web browser and that makes some visitors mad. You are not just disabling downloading, you are disabling every other feature that the right-click menu provides and is generally considered bad website development practice. It also has the unfortunate property of being easily defeated by turning off javascript (the technology required to implement this). It's also difficult to make this work for all web browsers. This doesn't actually prevent the downloading of the image, it just prevents the easiest mechanism for downloading the file. There are many other ways. So you are only preventing the least technologically savvy visitors from downloading your image.

It's also possible to create some technology to change the image into an encrypted format and then view those images in a "protected" viewer. This is a much more secure mechanism and comes a lot closer to the goal but it does have the problem increasing the chance that the technology won't work for any give visitor and they will see a "broken" web page. There are also web browsers for which this just isn't an option for. For instance, it would be unlikely to work on the newer mobile internet devices such as the iPhone or on the web browser of you Wii or other gaming console, etc. So it's really important to stick with well established and supported internet standards. Even on web browsers that this will work for, there is still the problem that it's relatively easy to use screen capture tools to grab the image in a way that is impossible to defeat.

Preventing all access to an image except for viewing is just not possible to do in a reasonable way.

Having said that, being able to prevent people from right clicking on an image does provide protection from casual copying of images so we have implemnted this. You can disable the right menu on images on your website by going to the Advanced page in your website's administration system and checking the box next to "Disable web browser right click menu on images (copy protect image)" in the Images section.

So, if we cannot prevent access to the image, what can we do to make the image undesirable for reuse but still looks reasonable for viewing?

Making the Image Undesirable for Reuse

The simplest thing that can be done is to make sure that the image is not available in a resolution higher that is absolutely necessary. The main protection you get here is that this generally makes the image unacceptable for printing. This prevents one of the major fears of theft: that a visitor will print out an image, frame it and put it on their wall. Or even worse, print, frame and sell the image. This is one of the tools that uses. You can upload an image of any size but our tools reduce the image resolution and quality before displaying it to your visitors.

You could also add a watermark to an image or just print a copyright on the image. This is a very effective deterrent but it suffers from two problems:

  1. All of your visitors are distracted by the visual impairment created by these marks,
  2. The kind of mark and it's location need to be considered carefully for each image (a manual process) to minimize the visual impairment but must also maximize the deterrent effects. If you put the mark in an obscure location on the image, it would be easy to crop or "repair".

If you wanted to use watermarks, the best approach would be to manually add these to each image using an image editing program such as photoshop, etc before uploading to ArtSites.