UK.Gov passes Instagram Act: All your pics belong to everyone now

Re: Ominous...

As I understand it, what the BBC does is already illegal/unlawful (I think illegal), under the terms of some new digital copyright something act (think DMCA watered down a bit). ISTR that there is specific language in the act making it illegal/unlawful to strip out the ownership details from a file.

The BBC says that they can't help it; it's their systems that do it, however the EXIF ownership info comes from the system that was put in place for photographic pictures for journalism, about the time that fax was invented. The BBC’s systems must just be a bit behind :/

Someone with a proper internet connection could probably find the relevant deatils on the UK Gov copyright pages.

Re: Ominous...

Probably not, because you'd have to prove the metadata was being stripped knowingly with a view to commercial benefit, and not because of some technical reason - such as the fact that it's a bit of extra work to put metadata back into images after you (e.g.) resize them.

And you could make a case that even if the metadata was being stripped deliberately - well, so what? It's not actually illegal if the owner has given you usage rights by agreeing to your T&Cs.

None of this is good or moral, and - as an occasional semi-pro photog - I certainly find it offensive personally.

But clearly the answer isn't to argue the toss legally - it's to make sure that no one ever votes the wankers in again.

Re: What about all the large UK tech companies?

I'm pretty sure large US Corporations are not poor.

Re: What about all the large UK tech companies?

"What about all the large UK tech companies? "

Name some. (That will benefit from this law change.)

Re: Oh this will be fun :D

Do you realize how large of an image it would take to 'display' Steamboat Willie'?

is there a way to make a watermark that's not obvious, but is still there when meta data has been stripped?

I know Digimarc have been offering a reasonably robust imperceptible watermarking service for some time now; possibly there are other similar companies out there. It isn't a trivial task, unfortunately.

"is there a way to make a watermark that's not obvious, but is still there when meta data has been stripped?"

Steganography. Use the least-significant bits for the RGBα. For 24 bit colour, this gives 4 bits per pixel, meaning for 1600x1200 you could have about 940kb of uncompressed byte-per-character text using lossless image compression, if my maths is right.

The trouble is, if it's that low-level, any sort of image processing would probably get rid of it. Something could perhaps be done with ratios of dominant colours, but that sounds horrendously unreliable and would itself mess up an image.

I fully admit I know very little of this area, so probably best to wait until someone more knowledgeable contributes - I know movie studios do it with their output so there must be a way (but that might just be audio...?).

not good for whistleblowers

I've tended to think being able to upload a photo anonymously to be an advantage. Watermark stripping software has legitimate uses for whistleblowers who want to report evidence of wrongdoing without being bullied and theatened.

Re: Re "Royally Fucked"...

The removal of metadata from photos and other electronic documents should be illegal. It's like taking a document that says "Copyright (C) YYYY Author. Licensed under whatever conditions the author has chosen.", removing those and claiming it is orphaned. You are not allowed under law to do that, so the same should be true with the metadata a document/photo has, because the metadata is part of that file.

This would, IMHO solve the problems here, in addition to educating people about providing metadata for their work just like educating people about adding copyright notices to their scripts/books/poems/etc..

@BenR - Re: Facebook / Instagram etc.

I think your points are quite valid.

A further point is that Facebook Terms allow them to commercially exploit what you've uploaded and we therefore might find Facebook and similar sites actively protecting that benefit, effectively attacking the non-dilligent on the user's behalf. Or maybe offering such a service at a price?

Re: Facebook / Instagram etc.

perhaps image searching may expand to Facebook and other sharing services?

Re: Facebook / Instagram etc.

You are being hopelessly naïve. An image may start on facebook but go through any number of copies, (maybe with modifications, metadata changes) to other places before the copyright thief 'discovers' it to claim as their own work.

Re: Facebook / Instagram etc.

If you were to assume that being present on a website shows ownership, then what prevents someone taking your image, forging some metadata that 'proves' that it was taken earlier than you posted it, and the accusing you of stealing the image yourself! Being posted to a web site is just not enough, especially if you are dealing with Instagram or Google

When it comes to identifying photos, diligent will mean either a quick check for the presence of metadata, or an incredibly huge and impractical manual search of millions and millions of images.

As far as I know, automatic comparison of pictures is still an inexact science, which means that it will be very difficult to automate the process of working out whether a picture is the same as another picture that someone claims ownership. It's probably easier with scanned film than digital images, because you can look for grain pattern and defects, but even that can be altered with digital filters.

Considering what is done routinely to crop, rotate, change the colour pallet, touch-up and resize images, you would have to have some means of automatically and reliably hashing a picture using the major distinctive features and be able to discriminate between different pictures of the same subject.

I'm sure there must be some major research going on, but I would think that any research will mainly be working on identification of the subject, not proving that two images are the same. Whether one can come from the other is a moot point, but without this technology, I would be much happier without this legislation unless you make it a major crime with appropriate punishments to strip or forge metadata.