JPEG Looking To Add DRM To Images... Supposedly To Protect Images From Gov't Surveillance
from the png,-here-we-come dept
You may recall the mess a few years ago when, under pressure from the movie studios, along with Netflix and Microsoft, the W3C agreed to add DRM to HTML5. This resulted in lots of debates and reasonable anger from people who found that the idea of building DRM into HTML5 went against the idea of an open internet. And, now it appears that the organization behind the JPEG standard for images is heading down a similar path.The JPEG committee investigates solutions to assure privacy and security when sharing photos on social networks, (stock) photography databases, etc. JPEG Privacy & Security will provide new functionality to JPEG encoded images such as ensuring privacy, maintaining data integrity, and protecting intellectual rights, while maintaining backwards and forward compatibility to existing JPEG legacy solutions.Further details suggest DRM that has all sorts of conditions included:
— With the popularization of online social networks (OSNs) and smart mobile devices, photo sharing is becoming a part of people’ daily life. An unprecedented number of photos are being uploaded and shared everyday through online social networks or photo hosting services, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Flickr. However, such unrestrained online photo or multimedia sharing has raised serious privacy concerns, especially after reports of citizens surveillance by governmental agencies and scandalous leakage of private photos from prominent photo sharing sites or online cloud services. Popular OSNs typically offer privacy protection solutions only in response to the public demand and therefore are often rudimental, complex to use, and provide limited degree of control and protection. Most solutions allow users to control either who can access the shared photos or for how long they can be accessed. In contrast, in this paper, we take a structured privacy by design approach to the problem of online photo privacy protection. We propose a privacy-preserving photo sharing architecture based on a secure JPEG scrambling algorithm capable of protecting the privacy of multiple users involved in a photo. We demonstrate the proposed photo sharing architecture with a prototype application called ProShare that offers JPEG scrambling as the privacy protection tool for selected regions in a photo, secure access to the protected images, and secure photo sharing on Facebook.Now that's definitely interesting, but it still raises some concerns about whether such DRM would actually be used to protect an individual's privacy or (much more likely) to try to limit public use of images for other reasons, such as trying to set up tollbooths on use (even fair use). I also wonder how effective any image-based DRM can really be in the longterm, given the ease of simply screenshotting an image to make a copy.
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Filed Under: control, drm, images, jpeg, surveillance
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I wonder if they will now moan and whine about keyboards having a "PrtScr" button is facilitating copyright infringement and that the removal of this button is absolutely necessary to combat image piracy.
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Wikipedia: Dazzle camouflage
It worked for ships in WWI and WWII. It's used today, to camouflage "next year's model" cars during testing. I propose that we apply it elsewhere.
An architect wants to forbid people to take pictures of his building? Cover it in dazzle camouflage except during approved photo sessions.
A sculptor wants to forbid people to take pictures of his sculpture? Dazzle camouflage.
Donald Trump wants control of how images of him are used? He should only appear in public in dazzle camouflage makeup.
DRM at the source. It's the only way.
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I thought that hair already was dazzle.
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Sold!
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So you're saying if I dazzle my dick picks, they won't show up all over the internet?
Roger Strong (profile), Jul 17th, 2015 @ 8:29am
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Or they might be mistaken for Donald Trump.
Have I got it right?
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For example? I'm serious. I'd really like to know.
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The same thing can happen for hardware-accelerated mouse cursors and opengl/directx output.
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Maybe, depending on how the stock print screen is implemented. However, it's trivial to develop a print screen function that can't be fooled or blocked.
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1) Everyone will hit print screen to take a screenshot of it, and save it in some other format without DRM.
or
2) Because no can view the DRMed image without paying first, everyone will just say "screw that" and hit the "go back one page" button on their browser.
Seriously now, videos have some value to them, just look at TV. But a single image? Even if it's a picture of a valuable painting you'll just be paying for a DRMed copy of an picture of the painting, which has no monetary value.
Web pages and videos can have value, but not a single image.
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Websites will lose out on visitors and lose income and that is good as most websites that are worth using have very little advertising or advertising that does not distract.
I read something a few years ago that html5 will be more secure for users and hopefully it will be easier for the hackers to create a few add ons that not only release drm and region blocks as now but also enable everyone to have an add on or two that completely hides our identities.
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Do you Orientally click on them?
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Response to: Anonymous Coward on Jul 15th, 2015 @ 12:12pm
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Re: Response to: Anonymous Coward on Jul 15th, 2015 @ 12:12pm
Oh..you mean professional photographers?
People whose income depends on particular laws always seem to oppose rule changes that would hurt their income.
Funny coincidence, that. For example, professional slave traders really opposed abolition.
The fact that interested parties have a given opinion doesn't mean much in terms of right or wrong.
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So bring it on, JPEG!
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PNG will never replace JPEG for the simple fact that it doesn't compress as well.
Don't get me wrong, PNG is the natural choice for a lossless image format, but for storing large images, JPEG is the winner.
A 2.5MB JPEG image easily becomes 8MB when converted to PNG. That might not sound like much when talking about a single image, but take all the space currently occupied by JPEGs and multiply it by three.
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Wow.
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Instead you'd have a collection of competing ID card services, each with exclusive content deals. Region-locked of course. You'd have a stack of ID cards, and probably multiple card readers to handle different standards.
It'll bring back memories of swapping floppy discs for each app and document on Apple II and Commodore computers.
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You're welcome.
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Enjoying the irony
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Re: Enjoying the irony
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Screenshots
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Will DRM Built Into Your Computer be the Next Step?
(Which, BTW, to an extent is what one OS--Apple OS X--already does, albeit it in a limited way with some of its versions of OS X. Apple's built-in screenshot capability won't let you take screenshots of its DVD player window/screen. You can, however, bypass that limitation using third party screenshot tools.)
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Re: Will DRM Built Into Your Computer be the Next Step?
That's exactly the kind of thing that "Trusted Computing" and the "Trusted Platform Module" are designed to implement.
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It's VHS vs BETA again
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Can't remember what exactly it was that they could hold over the W3C to make them budge?
@Mike
JPGs are for photos, if you want to make screenshots of text, simply use PNG, the file will be smaller and have no artifacts.
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Well we know that, so...
...how long will it be till they cry "Pirate!" and let slip the dogs of war? The idea is, circumventing the DRM would be taken as proof of deliberate infringement, or something.
This is another step in the consolidation of copyright as property; there's not going to be an expiry date built into this DRM, is there?
I thought not.
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Pointless
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This is an excellent reason
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