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DRM Graphics

Will JPEG's Next 'Privacy and Security' Features Include DRM? (davidgerard.co.uk) 155

Posted by EditorDavid from the big-picture dept.
David Gerard has concerns about the Joint Photographic Experts Group (the ISO working group handling the JPEG standard for image compression). "They seem to think they can advance the cause of DRM for JPEG images...with a bit of applied blockchain." He bases that charge on the fact that the JPEG committee organized a special session on blockchain, and then created an ad hoc group to define use cases. After six months' collaboration, the group has produced a white paper -- "Towards a Standardized Framework for Media Blockchain" -- as announced in the press release following the 80th meeting in July. The Executive Summary declares, "Fake news, copyright violation, media forensics, privacy and security are emerging challenges for digital media. JPEG has determined that blockchain technology has great potential as a technology component to address these challenges in transparent and trustable media transactions... [T]he standardization committee continues to work on improving various components of the standard. This includes incorporation of new technologies addressing current challenges related to transparent and trustable media transactions such as JPEG Privacy and Security."

"JPEG Privacy and Security" is described later in the paper. "JPEG Privacy & Security aims at developing a standard for realizing secure image information sharing, capable of ensuring privacy, maintaining data integrity, and protecting intellectual property rights."

That is, "Privacy and Security" is a euphemism for Digital Rights Management (DRM) in JPEG.... Chair of the group Dr, Frederik Temmermans stressed to me that "JPEG is not working on DRM in particular but on a more generic framework that supports privacy and security features." But DRM is very much a significant part of this.
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Will JPEG's Next 'Privacy and Security' Features Include DRM? More

Will JPEG's Next 'Privacy and Security' Features Include DRM?

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  • This helps the migration to png, thanks! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    If you really want to lose your customer base, add in unwanted DRM

    • And in this case, the customer base is 0. What we all use is an ancient version of JPEG -- the format has completely ossified. Any proposed additions get a big fat rejection: see the libjpeg8 debacle. With a compat break, you can as well go to a completely new format, and proposals from the JPEG group have been laughed out (see JPEG2000).

      So the public would move to:
      * FLIF (free, technically the best, esp. for non-photographic or hybrid images)
      * AVIF (free, has big political backing)
      * BPG (useless because

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        What we all use is an ancient version of JPEG -- the format has completely ossified.

        But such an ancient format leaves you free to write the encoder however you want and there were major improvements over the years/decades.
        MP3 is the same on this aspect. MP3s made in the 90s are known to be garbage, relatively. Did you know that MP3 is a good as AAC? I found some comparison using the latest MP3 encoder (probably just the latest version of LAME) and you can't really tell them apart. Although, AAC was just a bit overhyped, was probably better early on but still 128K AAC sounds bad if for you

        • Did you know that MP3 is a good as AAC?

          Uhm, there are MP3 samples at 320kbps (the max allowed by the format) that even I, with my aged ears and not so good gear, can ABX from lossless. Those with better ears and more training can ABX a typical not-specially-picked piece of music (stress on "music", there's a lot of crap serfed for ~4 bits of dynamic range).

          You want OPUS not AAC, by the way, it's a good deal better, with no sample+gear+person combination known to ABX it at 128kbps, and hard at 96kbps.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Kjella ( 173770 )

        And a lossy image format is something for which DRM is a non-starter, because of the ease of screenshotting or even taking the picture of the screen with a camera.

        Not sure why you emphasized lossy, taking a screenshot of a JPG is less useful than a screenshot of a PNG as you lost the most efficient representation and will either have to save it losslessly or suffer transcoding losses. As for the analog hole that's true for using a video camera too but DRM for video is still a big thing, what you can snap with your cell phone will have a lot lower quality. That leaves screenshots, of course this would have to tie into the protected media framework but for all intents

    • Addressing IP issues, blockchain, privacy *and* fake news? This sounds like a desparate bid to remain relevant. “organized a special session on blockchain, and then created an ad hoc group to define use cases.” That ought to tell you the whole story right there.

  • Honestly.. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Fuck DRM. Tired of the constant battles, tired of watching the shrinking public domain. Tired of rightsholders benefiting from technology and giving little back. Tired of the constant battle for an open Internet. Fuck 'em all.
  • There's no patent on jpeg. So who says people have to use DRM'd jpeg encoders?

    • No, but every movie studio, professional photographer and other media company will because their lawyers and CEOs will demand it.

  • JPEG2000 didn't teach them (Score:4, Insightful)

    by CaptQuark ( 2706165 ) on Sunday August 12, 2018 @12:40AM (#57110050)
    I guess they didn't learn from their ill-received JPEG2000 format that not everyone appreciates messing with a near-universal standard. Maybe they will call the Blockchain version JPEG2020 so we can ignore it too.

    ---
    • Yeah getting the buzzword "2000" wasn't enough. Now they decided to go with a buzzword *and* a technology that won't actually work to reach their goal (OK, proof of ownership is one thing, but block chain won't stop screenshots. It's not designed to do that)

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Kjella ( 173770 )

      I guess they didn't learn from their ill-received JPEG2000 format that not everyone appreciates messing with a near-universal standard. Maybe they will call the Blockchain version JPEG2020 so we can ignore it too.

      Which is why I'm not very concerned. The JPEG group was there at the right time, in the right place 25 years ago when we needed a "good enough" picture standard for the web and I don't know they've achieved anything of significance since. There's been tons of attempts to replace it which hasn't moved the needle an inch, it'd take an industry-wide alliance with a completely royalty free and open standard to even stand a chance. I'll believe it when I see cameras do "RAW+[new image format]" instead of "RAW+JP

    • It featured a lossless compression mode. Back around 2000, I used JPEG2000 to make archival copies of my scanned photos. They came out roughly half the size of an equivalent TIFF.

      JPEG2000's drawback (and probably its undoing) was that it was simply too processor-intensive for the hardware at the time. It took my 300 MHz Celeron about 5 minutes to compress a photo into JPEG2000 format, nearly a minute to decompress (read) it. That meant that you still had to rely on TIFF to save your intermediate phot

    • Maybe they learned that enough people on corporate repeater sites like these will dance the DRM (digital restrictions management [gnu.org] because I side with the user class) two-step: when something isn't yet implemented, push for its need absent any evidence that such need exists. Ignore that we need not think above business above all else, and ignore that even within that all-too-limited business-first framing businesses existed and worked at least as well without DRM. Later, if the DRM is implemented but not yet

  • JPEG? Is that still a thing?

  • if they wanted 'authentication'.. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    as in 'is this picture the authentic original'. digital signature and checksum could simply be embedded into the file.

    resize, resample, crop, or otherwise alter the image and the checksum fails.

    anything else is over-reaching that stated goal.

    if jpg evolves into a drm-laden piece of shit, the format will die

  • Mockery is the best weapon.

  • A big one is a digital signature to verify lack of tampering (photoshop). Ideally, you'd like to be able to crop or redact some portions but still have a valid signature on the rest. (Some sort of tree hash seems the obvious way to do that.)

    And blockchain is a good way to build a notary service, attesting to the fact that I took a picture prior to some time. Either for copyright registration ordocumentary ("this picture of Bad Shit was taken during the incident and not staged later") purposes.

  • Stupid people aren't going to make sure the pictures they look at have a proper paper trail, just like they don't fact-check things now. And groups seeking to spread fake-news either aren't going to use a traceable image format, or they will merely screenshot and resave the image before using it themselves to break the chain.

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