A Question of Rights and Plagiarism

[Mark Oliva]

I <SNIP> have considered posting the whole image only up to a certain point, then after the map is more than half way done, to post only sections of particular interest at any one time; making subtle variations of HSL between the completed sections and perhaps missing out a few thin slithers altogether, so that its actually impossible to reconstruct the whole from the parts.

In fact, I'm already doing it

I can't endorse that. It's fine when zoom views are germane to the discussion at hand, but this is, among other things, a discussion site for our cartographic work and its development. WIP postings that show what you really are doing are an important part of this discussion process. Letting the misbehavior of Internet cowboys lead you to limiting your part of the discussion to zoom views squelches much of the discussion as far as your work is concerned, and in the end, is not productive. As already has been discussed thoroughly, there are better ways to deal with the cowboys.

On the other hand, I'm all for your new Mouse icon. Excellent!

[Mouse]

Thank you Mark. It's a photograph by Szasz-Fabian Jozsef, legitimately purchased from Adobe.com

On the other point...

Where for many cartographers a map is an end unto itself, when it is part of the web illustration set for an as yet unpublished book, and a cowboy steals it and passes it off as something else entirely, it soils the book - it damages my unfinished written work of art.

Where the Observatory first floor is concerned in particular, the "thumbnail" on Bartoli's site had already disappeared before I changed the filename to break the link to the original stored on the Cartographer's Guild server. Also, the thumbnails for the other two floors he stole are still there in their un-watermarked state, even though those links no longer work for the same reason. All this suggests that in my case he really did download the originals.

I am also one of the very few CG artists who was never acknowledged by name, which further supports this theory of mine.

Assuming that I am right, I now have to face the worrying possibility that Bartoli had a pretty good reason to remove the thumbnail of the ground floor from his own site himself before I got there. The most logical explanation is that he was offered something for it, and sold it to someone else. That being the case, he can keep the money, since I am certain it wasn't all that much. The work, after all, is of a particular style (my own), and is unlikely to ever be complimented by any further work in the same style, because there will always be just a little bit missing from all future uploads to ALL the forums I use, (not just this one).

I am more concerned however, that when I do publish my novel, and the Observatory goes up on my author's webpage as part of the supporting media, if someone out there believes that they have purchased all rights in the Observatory ground floor they might even commence legal proceedings against me for 'stealing' my own work.

I will of course be able to provide the original filename.FCW file from which the image was exported, and no one will be able to prove I was paid for it, or provide copies of a signed contract of sale with my name on it - not even Bartoli. The thing I fear is that I may have to sort something like that out with a whole bunch of irate American laywers (and lets face it they do have something of a global rep for being quite unnecessarily vicious, and for bending reality in such a convoluted manner that when taken to the extreme, black may seem white, and vice-versa). This is what makes me feel sick about it all. I've done nothing wrong to deserve it.

That is why all my future images will be missing some small part from now on. I can weather a storm like that once... twice even, but if it should happen multiple times, I fear that my creative spirit may drown in a deluge of bitterness and anger... and where would be the point in that? I should certainly never write or draw anything again, if that were to happen to me.

[waldronate]

If you're concerned about folks messing with watermarks and so on, I recommend doing two things: put your copyright information into the metadata (where it can be easily stripped out) and use a steganography package or technique to embed identifying information directly in the image data (where it's much more difficult to remove). If your concern is to prevent theft of the whole images, then you will have to leave out information as you have described.

Hidden watermarks offer a convenient way to prove provenance for the artwork and the nice thing about hidden watermarks is that most thieves are unsophisticated and won't know to remove them. A good watermarking system will allow the recovery of the watermark even if only a small fraction of the original image remains.

Note that any commercial web site with US presence MUST take down the offending material when given notice (most sites have a "report" button that can be used for such things).

[Mouse]

If you're concerned about folks messing with watermarks and so on, I recommend doing two things: put your copyright information into the metadata (where it can be easily stripped out) and use a steganography package or technique to embed identifying information directly in the image data (where it's much more difficult to remove). If your concern is to prevent theft of the whole images, then you will have to leave out information as you have described.

Hidden watermarks offer a convenient way to prove provenance for the artwork and the nice thing about hidden watermarks is that most thieves are unsophisticated and won't know to remove them. A good watermarking system will allow the recovery of the watermark even if only a small fraction of the original image remains.

Note that any commercial web site with US presence MUST take down the offending material when given notice (most sites have a "report" button that can be used for such things).

I've never even heard of steganography, and had to go and look it up to find out what you meant. As I understand it now, its the placement of text within the actual image - visible, but subtle enough that it doesn't depreciate the quality of the image.

Now that I know about it, I for one would very much like to start using it straight away. Is there a particular package you would recommend for doing this?

[Redrobes]

The better but expensive way to do this is to buy a piece of software and use it.

The cheap way to do something less well is to make a large image (bigger than most images you use) and fill it with mid grey ( level 128 ). Then create a new image which is quite small and put some text into it like "Mouse" and if you can make the text speckled. Now make the text black with same grey background and stamp that all over the large image in random places leaving plenty of gaps. if you can then change the text and speckle pattern a bit over the course of the stamping.

Now invert the little image so the text is white speckled and stamp that in random places over the large image as well so you have a grey image covered in black and white speckled Mouse texts.

Blur that image slightly and then use the contrast tool to lower the contrast so that its basically mid grey with very slightly lighter and darker splats of text on it.

Save that image.

Now any time you want to watermark a map you take the map and the grey image and do image arithmetic on it and multiply them together and divide by 128. Gimp could certainly make doing arithmetic easier but most graphics apps allow this straight forward. In gimp do it with layers and use the overlay attribute on it. If you want to batch doing that then image magic could generate the watermarking mask at the same time then it could generate it different each time.

We have another thread about selling stuff on the guild. I could write an app which does this in about half an hour so you just load your image push one button and out pops the watermarked version. Not very secure but then it would be tuppence for the guild kitty !...

See examples. Edit - hoo man, you might have to download the images to see whats going on there - at least on my monitor its not very clear. I mean, if it were clear then it would be no good ! So, yeah, anyway - there you have it.

[Robbie]

I've been in communication now with Carl, and I can assure you the images were not intentionally being used in a nefarious manner...the lack of attribution was due to "not having enough time" which I'm correcting him on...I've also requested to have the offending maps removed from his group, and I've told him to no longer direct-link to attachments (which I will be forcing as a policy soon enough). So you have nothing to worry about as far as your work having been stolen or sold. Worst case scenario at this point is that your maps are being used as battle maps in someones personal D&D game. No publisher in their right mind would attempt to publish for sale a work with any maps taken from a group like this.

I'm still working with several folks to reach a full conclusion to this issue, but if the maps don't get removed, the best course of action would be to report them to Facebook. (I checked, the option exists and is very easy)

[Mouse]

RedRobes - the middle image is making my eyes dance so I can't actually look at it. How weird is that? But the end result is pretty impressive. Thanks. I will give it a go

As for automatically doing this to uploaded images... just how many genius ideas do you usually have in a 24 hour period? I mean. Come on now. Most people would be pushing it at one, but THREE!

Robbie... what can I say, except that you've made this particular Guild member feel several tons better about all this ruckus. You're a true champion. Thank you!

[ladiestorm]

Yes, Robbie, thanks so much for all you have done with this! And I hope that from now on, Carl, and others like him, realize that he needs to ASK before posting other people's work.

The funny thing is, if he had come to me and asked me, I would have probably let him post the maps he pulled... AFTER Bogie's art pack was released, and with the condition that he credit me using my professional name.

On a side note...Mouse, I bet we could get that watermarking effect in cc3+ fairly easily. Maybe by creating a watermarking sheet, exploding the text, and adding the transparency effect?. This would also work in conjunction with the selling idea. The image that we upload could have the watermark sheet visible, and the downloadable version, once purchased, would have the watermark sheet hidden.

If we combined it with a visible copyright info....that would go a long way....what do you think?

[Mouse]

I'm really banking on Redrobes being as clever as I think he is...... and making it an automatic thing you can chose to have as you upload each image.

Making a sheet that does the same thing in CC3+ would be easy enough as an temporary measure. But you would have to put up with it suddenly appearing every time you clicked "show all sheets", and having to hide it again. I'd use a transparency effect, followed by a blend effect.

If you want I can send you a blank file with a watermark sheet set up for you, so you can put whatever you like on it. Once you've got the effect settings you can make your own for each map, or set yourself up a template with it already there.

[Mouse]

Yes - look. Here you go. This is a very much simplified version of what Redrobes did earlier (there's no stippled grey background or anything), but I would say that as a half measure it would be pretty difficult to remove the word MOUSE from this piece I'm working on right now because its been multiplied into the actual picture. This uses just plain mid grey text, but you could use a texture fill instead, which would be closer to what Redrobes did.