image protection

Safeguarding copyrighted images in an electronic format, especially the Internet. The Web has made it very easy to save an image that appears on a Web site. All you have to do is right click the image and select Save Picture As or Save Image As and give it a file name. Due to the fact that high-resolution images are not as necessary for screen display as they are for print, most Web images are low resolution and thus provide a form of automatic copy protection for print purposes. Printing a low-res image will not produce a high-quality picture.

However, in order to provide image protection, there has to be cooperation between the browser and the Web server. For example, Finjan Software's Vital Security for Documents system (formerly from Alchemedia) lets you download a browser plug-in that will display images from a Mirage server, but will not let you save them or do a print-screen.

Vital Security for Documents

If you try to save the picture at the top, the blue dialog box appears directing you to another site or to pay for the image. If you try to print the screen, the image will be blanked out (bottom) when you paste it into an image editor. (Images courtesy of Finjan Software Ltd., www.finjan.com)