You dont need to own a Web-based photo gallery to worry about image theft. If youve paid an artist thousands of dollars to design custom graphics, you certainly dont want the images turning up on your competitors site. And even if all you have is a small family site, you probably dont want pictures of your children available to whoever comes along. What can you do? You probably cant stop truly determined thieves, but there are a number of steps you can take to discourage image theft.
There are four ways to copy Web images: browser commands, notably the right-click menus Save picture command; site grabbers and online search engines; the browsers cache; and screen-capture programs or Windows PrintScreen feature. Its difficult to block all four methods. Screen capture is particularly hard to block and requires expensive encryption software such as Alchemedias Mirage Enterprise (www.alchemedia.com) and ArtistScopes CopySafe (http://artistscope.com/copysafe). The alternative is to make stealing images difficult and inconvenient.
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