Adobe and Twitter Are Designing a System For Permanently Attaching Artists' Names To Pictures (theverge.com) 62
Adobe, Twitter, and The New York Times Company have announced a new system for adding attribution to photos and other content. A tool will record who created a piece of content and whether it's been modified by someone else, then let other people and platforms check that data. The Verge reports: The overall project is called the Content Authenticity Initiative, and its participants will hold a summit on the system in the next few months. Based on what Adobe has announced, the attribution tool is a piece of metadata that can be attached to a file. Adobe doesn't describe precisely how it will keep the tag secure or prevent someone from copying the content in a way that strips it out. Adobe chief product officer Scott Belsky said that some technical details will be worked out at the summit. Adobe described this system as a way to verify "authenticity" online. And The New York Times Company's research and development head, Marc Lavallee, suggested it could fight misinformation by helping people discern "trusted news" on digital media platforms.
But the most obvious uses include identifying a photo's source and making sure artists get credit for their work. Many photos and webcomics circulate anonymously on platforms like Twitter, and an attribution tag would help trace those images back to their creator. This depends entirely on how well the CAI system works, however. Tags wouldn't be very useful if they could be easily altered or removed, but if the system preserves security by tightly controlling how people can interact with the image, it could have the same downsides as other digital rights management or DRM systems.
But the most obvious uses include identifying a photo's source and making sure artists get credit for their work. Many photos and webcomics circulate anonymously on platforms like Twitter, and an attribution tag would help trace those images back to their creator. This depends entirely on how well the CAI system works, however. Tags wouldn't be very useful if they could be easily altered or removed, but if the system preserves security by tightly controlling how people can interact with the image, it could have the same downsides as other digital rights management or DRM systems.
Excellent (Score:4, Funny)
Finally I can be assured credit for all my dick pics.
Re:Excellent (Score:5, Funny)
Are you sure you'll be able to watermark your name into so few pixels?
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I just use the initials.
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This fellow was so deeply in love that just before he was married, he had his bride's name tattooed on his love muscle. Normally, only the first and last letters were visible, although when he was aroused, the tattoo spelled out W-E-N-D-Y. Now they're on their honeymoon at a resort in Montego Bay. One night, in the men's room, this fellow finds himself standing next to a tall Jamaican at the urinal.
To his amazement, he notices that this man, too, has the letters W-Y tattooed on his penis. "Excuse me," he sa
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It's okay you can use AI to upscale it. Mind you training the AI with source material is difficult. At least that's what I told my mother when she entered the room unexpectedly.
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Great, even more DRMed Technology (Score:5, Insightful)
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Why does this need to be DRMed? It sounds to me like Adobe & co just want to put a non-visible tag on images that's reasonably resilient against recompression, cropping, and other forms of social media image maiming.
It sounds more like a machine-readable watermark than anything else.
Content ID (Score:4, Insightful)
Be assured that as with youtube the system will only be available for huge media companies. (I'm referring to big media companies taking videos that go viral, but striking anyone who does the reverse)
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Who said anything about DRM? It's metadata added to the image that is preserved when you copy it, so maybe it's embedded in the low order bits of some of the RGB values or something. It won't stop you doing what you like with the image, it will just make it harder to argue that you had no way of knowing who owned the copyright in court.
How long to crack? (Score:4, Insightful)
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This is the obvious workaround, yes. But perhaps if the image is also hashed and registered in a database somewhere, you would be able to take a comic floating around on the internet and ask the DB who originally made it and have it lead you back to them. If you're stripping the metadata for your own collection, who cares? The real problem is when people try to pass work off as their own when it isn't.
But in the end, this is still an unsolvable problem. See the hundreds of assholes that find an illustration
Re: How long to crack? (Score:1)
If something is simple enough to put on a t-shirt, then expending the resources to run a legal industry protecting that type of shit is wasteful.
We need to realise that not everything needs to be monetized. We spend more money protecting old profit streams than we do developing new ones.
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Developing new profit streams requires talent and creativity. Protecting old ones only requires lawyers.
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I mean, that's easy to say as someone that doesn't make their living at this stuff. Artists are trying to make a living, and having someone swoop in and appropriate their original work must be galling at best. And on top of that, you have to fight against the perception that you're not the original creator of the work, the person that put it on a popular t-shirt was—that would probably impact your portfolio. I feel a great deal of sympathy for those creators. It's hard.
But, like I said, I just don't s
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Try taking a screenshot of a bluray movie playing on your computer. The OS is collaborating with the DRM that decodes the video, and the region of the screen where the video is will probably be a black rectangle.
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The OS is collaborating with the DRM that decodes the video,...
'Your' OS maybe. Not mine.
And if it requires his OS then run it from a virtual machine in yours.
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Try taking a screenshot of a bluray movie playing on your computer. The OS is collaborating with the DRM that decodes the video, and the region of the screen where the video is will probably be a black rectangle.
Nope.
Microsoft's built-in screen recorder works just fine.
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Presumably they are embedding the data in the image itself, so that even screenshotting won't remove it.
Some movie companies experimented with that technique a while back. Add a watermark to the image, preferably an invisible and hard to remove one, and then when it gets pirated you can trace it back to the cinema that the print was stolen from. There was talk of narrowing it down to individual PPV subscribers.
Assuming you don't need many bits you can do it as a low frequency low amplitude signal that will
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Presumably they are embedding the data in the image itself, so that even screenshotting won't remove it.
Some movie companies experimented with that technique a while back. Add a watermark to the image, preferably an invisible and hard to remove one, and then when it gets pirated you can trace it back to the cinema that the print was stolen from. There was talk of narrowing it down to individual PPV subscribers.
Assuming you don't need many bits you can do it as a low frequency low amplitude signal that will survive multiple recompressions, resizing, rotation etc.
I think that would work until the pirate knows what elements of the image contain the message and then can either remove it or add equally invisible noise to hide it
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I don't think it's supposed to be piracy proof at all. It's designed to let you confirm copyright status of an image you find, even if it's been copy/pasted, meme text added and recompressed over and over.
You can sue someone for copyright infringement even if they remove your watermark and metadata. It's about attribution, not preventing piracy.
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If it can be displayed on a computer then it can be captured with a screen shot!
Not necessarily (see the other reply about Bluray DRM). But more importantly, copying the image won't help you. Going back to at least Photoshop 4 or something, there was a plugin from Digimarc bundled in that embedded copyright information right into the image. Probably worked as a form of steganography, so if you copied a screenshot, the metadata would be copied as well.
I never used it for anything serious but in my experiments it proved quite robust to recompression with jpeg or some light filtering. Of
Sounds like another (Score:5, Interesting)
Just my 2 cents
EXIF already has a copyright field (Score:5, Insightful)
Then again judging by the popularity of copyright info in the appropriate EXIF field it's safe to conclude only a very tiny minority of users ever wanted this.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Old news (Score:1)
Camera (Score:3)
Any picture taken by your camera could be watermarked in the same way with your unique cell phone identifier so "they" know who to come after if they need to.
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Who said anything about a cell phone camera?
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Hmm...I know of no watermarking that can be forced into my film cameras.
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Film-based cameras should be safe, but almost nobody uses them.
Digital cameras only need a software update to gain a post-processing watermarking feature. That's not hard to do. If not a software update, then such a feature could be phased into new model cameras/phones over time. Look at how facial recognition and fingerprint recognition are finding their way more and more into our phones, for a plausibly "good reason". The "good reason" for watermarking all your photos with your device id could plausib
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There is no DRM strong enough to plug the "analogue hole." /Oblg. And nothing of value was lost (or protected.)
Need we worry? (Score:1)
XKCD: Standards (Score:2)
With that title do I even need to link it?
https://xkcd.com/927/ [xkcd.com]
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Replying to yourself is bad form, but I just checked that comic's alt-text. I am infinitely amused that we have since moved on to using USB-C for charging.
Blockchain (Score:2)
I'm surprised they haven't rolled out a blockchain solution yet.
No. Bits are changeable (Score:1)
Changing the bits changes the pic. (Know hash) (Score:3)
Are you perhaps familiar with hash functions such as md5 and sha2? One requirement of a hash function is that a small change to thr input results in a large change to the output. Changing one bit of input changes about half of the bits of the output. Hash functions have other requirements too, so it takes a very clever person to design a solid hash function. (As in a handful of people in the entire world can do it right.)
Maybe you're familiar with digital signatures? Same idea, the bits are arranged suc
Nice try, but nope. I has to survive Facebook res (Score:2)
Facebook automatically resizes images. Other sites do as well. Therefore at a MINIMUM the system has to easily handle multiple resize operations.
You mentioned "without visually changing the image".
Think about that for a minute. The attacker wishes to avoid changing how the image displays visually. The practitioner wishes to ensure that as long as the image looks the same, the steganography can be decoded. How would YOU add adjust the image in a durable way if YOU knew that the image wouldn't be visibly
You're not familiar with jpeg? (Score:2)
So I take it you're not at all familiar with jpeg, much less watermarking.
Go ahead and try diffing these and removing or changing the watermarks. To make it as easy for you as possible I used black and white line drawings.
https://s3.amazonaws.com/ray.t... [amazonaws.com]
https://s3.amazonaws.com/ray.t... [amazonaws.com]
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If you change every copy of the bits to change authorship
It's my understanding that most of the people redistributing images online do so without trying to claim credit for them. So garbling or stripping out the watermark is good enough. If some platforms refuse to distribute images without a CAI mark, then that can be circumvented by adding some noise to the original sufficient to mask the mark and then adding your own. 'Adding some noise' could be done by software. Or snapping a photo of a PC screen. The new identity could be pseudonymous, hiding the identity o
Let's try it! (An easy, steg 101 case for you) (Score:2)
> that can be circumvented by adding some noise to the original sufficient to mask the mark and then adding your own.
> 'Adding some noise' could be done by software.
Let's try it. You "add some noise" so that I can no longer distinguish these two images, which I've watermarked. To make it as easy as possible for you, I used simple black and white drawings. Color images and photos, which have lots of gradients, have a lot more data for me to hide things in.
https://s3.amazonaws.com/ray.t... [amazonaws.com]
https://s3. [amazonaws.com]
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You took a photo of steg2, and degraded the image (Score:2)
You definitely degraded the quality when you took a photo of a screen showing steg2. I can still tell it's steg2, not steg1.
You cropped steg1 (Score:2)
Although you cropped out the center of the picture, you didn't remove the digital watermark. That's the center of steg1.jpg.
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It's about accountability... (Score:2)
We have to make sure that we know who was responsible for the Emoji movie, and the rise of skywalker.
Good Luck (Score:2)
It appears Adobe has never heard of taking a screenshot before? Good luck keeping the metadata intact.
Lol, good joke, your snake oil! (Score:2)
Signal Messenger already kills that dead in the water.
They looked for a way to be absolutely certain there are no traces in the images you send. Their solution is to simply re-compress them. Kills all the metadata, the steganography, watermarks, etc.
But there are still morons who believe saying you "own" information is a valid application of the word and does mean anything at all in the real world. (What does it mean, to "own" something that can be "taken" from you and you still have it, and that can be spr
I'm surprised nobody mentioned this (Score:4, Insightful)
This new tagging advancement has Big Brother's Stamp of Approval!
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Man, it's embarrassing to catch a blatant mistake in your post when it's way too late to correct it.
Must be Crap (Score:2)
This must be crap because there is no Blockchain. They need Blockchain to have anything worthwhile. Without Blockchain this will go nowhere.
Sounds like a way to prove authenticity (Score:2)
This doesn't make sense as a DRM method. It would be almost impossible to prevent people from copying the image. But it makes a lot of sense as a way to prove the image hasn't been edited. It's pretty clear from the press release this is what it's really about
"Discerning trusted news on the internet is one of the biggest challenges news consumers face today," said Marc Lavallee, head of Research & Development, The New York Times Company. "Combating misinformation will require the entire ecosystem--creators, publishers and platforms--to work together. This initiative lays the groundwork for doing that through open standards and protocols."
If an image has the proper signature, you know who created it and you know it hasn't been edited by anyone else.