Securing the Pictures on a website

[Antithott]

Hi all,

I run a small site where people can upload their pictures and members can vote and comment on em, sorta like a hot or not site.

My problem is that i noticed 2 other sites which "Steal" my pictures. So to prevent this i first disabled Right click on the pages, that didnt work.
Then i put on a watermark, and still they take the pictures, some they edit and remove watermark, and others they just use with watermark.

My question is.

Is there someway i can put better security of the pictures on the site. For example. i was thinking along the lines of somehow overlaying with another picture which point to a blank image? or changing the Download url after showing the image.

If you have any idea or a good suggestion or maybe some code you already used, i would much appreciate the chance to talk / Try it out.

 

[ca8msm]

If you put pictures on a website people can view them them and potentially steal them. It's as simple as that and there is no security that will stop this.

What you can do is add the watermark and clearly state that these are copyrighted images. If someone else then does steal them. they are in breach of copright and you can persue the matter legally.


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Mark,
[URL unfurl="true"]http://aspnetlibrary.com[/url]
[URL unfurl="true"]http://mdssolutions.co.uk[/url] - Delivering professional ASP.NET solutions
[URL unfurl="true"]http://weblogs.asp.net/marksmith[/url]

 

[Antithott]

But that doesnt help me much, as it takes to much time and money to pursue another legally.

I was thinking of a way to make it harder atleast.
Right now they need to open the sourcecode and find the picture URL and go there to download it.

I had hoped this was enough to stop most of it, but sadly its not.


Still looking for input on the problem if anyone has an idea.

 

[ca8msm]

Actually it does help you as it points out that there isn't any method available that will protect your images. No matter what security you implement, if the picture is available for the browser to see, it is available for the user to download. It's as simple as that.


-------------------------------------------------------

Mark,
[URL unfurl="true"]http://aspnetlibrary.com[/url]
[URL unfurl="true"]http://mdssolutions.co.uk[/url] - Delivering professional ASP.NET solutions
[URL unfurl="true"]http://weblogs.asp.net/marksmith[/url]

 

[ca8msm]

faq215-3101 in case you want another take on it.


-------------------------------------------------------

Mark,
[URL unfurl="true"]http://aspnetlibrary.com[/url]
[URL unfurl="true"]http://mdssolutions.co.uk[/url] - Delivering professional ASP.NET solutions
[URL unfurl="true"]http://weblogs.asp.net/marksmith[/url]

 

[dpk136]

I think all over the internet, this has been beaten to death. If you publish something to the web, be prepared to deal with people stealing it. it seems like you are taking all the right steps (watermarking and disable right clicking). Even if you have a way to encrypt what is coming over the line in the view source a user can still go to their temp internet files folder and see all the pictures that were on your site.

I'm not sure how you are putting a watermark on your pictures, but you may want to try out another way of doing it. If you are watermarking in one color, try doing a gradient fill on the watermark.

The final step is taking legal action, or threatening it. What you can do is go to a lawyer and have him write up an email or letter to send to people who are infringing on your copyright about how you are willing to pursue legal action if they do not remove the image. You don't have to follow up on this threat, but a lot of people may be scared and just take it down.

Good luck.

David Kuhn

 

[BoulderBum]

While you won't be able to avoid people downloading your images (if they're crafty), you CAN control remote-linking with an HttpHandler so people aren't stealing your bandwidth.

In particular, if someone is remote-linking to your images, you can serve a special version that either contains a message like (you need to come to

http://www.MySite.com

to view this image) or you can at least apply a special watermark dynamically so remote-linked images give you free advertising.

See the bottom of this article:

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms972953.aspx

MCP, MCTS - .NET Framework 2.0 Web Applications