Yeah, yeah, yeah. We all know there is no way to completely keep people from stealing your images if you put them on the internet. That doesn't mean you can't encourage people to not steal them. It doesn't mean you can't encourage them to do the right thing. I wrote on this topic almost two years ago and said "my philosophy is to help people and give them the opportunity to do the right thing and most often they will. On my photography website I list a copyright notice on every page stating that all the work on the site is mine. This reminds people that a real person created all the content on the site and if they take it they’re taking it from a real person. Beyond that though I offer the opportunity to buy prints and licenses of my work. I make contact information easy to find and encourage people to contact me with questions or comments about my work. I encourage them to do the right thing."

Derek Powazek has done some thinking about this topic as well. He personally doesn't like putting copyright notices or watermarks directly on his images because 1) it distracts from the image and 2) determined thieves will just crop them our anyway. He's come up with an alternative though. It's a technique for photographers to use on websites that puts copyright notices, reminders about not stealing and contact information in a format that's hidden from view (and therefore doesn't interfere with the image like watermarks can) until someone right clicks on the image.

It's a cool, simple technique that adds a layer of encouragement to your photos. Encouragement? Yep, encouragement. It's not adding any more protection to your photos but it is subtly reminding people that taking your image without permission is wrong and encouraging them to do the right thing by either not taking your image or by contacting you and asking your permission/requirements for usage.

If you haven't been following the Lane Hartwell situation Derek Powazek has a really good wrap up of events up to this point.

Lane has just released her statement about the situation and it has caused me to reaffirm my complete support of her and her actions. Many people have said they're happy when others steal their works because it means the work is good enough to steal or they're happy when people steal their works and then create new works because hey new stuff is cool. That's great for those people. I encourage those people to release all of their works under the appropriate Creative Commons license and be happy and merry and bright with all the sharing and the stealing. I don't mean that sarcastically. If you don't mind your work being taken and re-used that's great but here's my issue: the creator, gets to choose if people can take and re-use his work. If someone posts his work on the internet and explicitly says that all rights are reserved then all rights are reserved by that artist. End of story. If the artist releases his work under a creative commons license that allows use or perhaps the artist even just says, basically, sometimes people steal my work but cool sometimes cool stuff comes out of that theft so I'm just going to say "ok take my stuff" that's fine, but each and every person creating original work, in my opinion, gets to make that decision.

And I think that saying "people on the internet are going to steal so suck it up" is bullshit. That's kind of like saying "people in the real world are going to commit armed robbery so suck it up." Yeah, some people on the internet steal stuff just like some people in the physical world steal stuff. That doesn't make it right in either instance.

I got an email today about Box.net's new OpenBox service which allows the editing of photos stored online.

OpenBox allows you to "bring the power of web applications directly into your existing Box account". Translation? If you're storing and sharing photos with Box.net you can right click on any photo in your Box.net account and edit the image with Picnik

What is Box.net?

Box.net is an online storage and sharing service that gives you access to your files from anywhere. With Box, you can access important documents from your desktop computer, laptop, or even mobile phone. Once you've uploaded your files to your online storage on Box, you can also share them with anyone, anytime — Box makes online web file sharing simple.

In the "huge step forward in the evolution of digital photography online" Flickr has just announced a partnership with online photo editing service Picnik.

Picnik’s awesome photo editing tools are now only a click away. If you’ve ever wanted to deal with the dreaded red eye or crop a photo just so, click on the new “edit photo” icon located above one of your photos and get started.

Picnik has been providing online photo editing for a while now. As soon as we saw it, we knew that there was huge potential for us to join together. Rather than Flickr diverting from our speciality to enter a realm we had no (particular) expertise in, the thought of a partnership seemed much more sensible.

The Picnik/Flickr collaboration works similarly to other 3rd party services who’ve built additional tools on top of the Flickr API: You’ll need to pass through the step of giving the Picnik service permission to edit and save your photos… It’s a little bit like you’re “installing” Picnik on your Flickr account, but with nothing to download.

Nikon and Flickr sitting in a tree, K I S S I N G. The lovefest/sponsorship/partnership between Nikon and Flickr has been going on for a while but now they've stepped up their affections even more with the announcement of the Nikon Digital Learning Center on Flickr.

Canon announced some exciting things today like 3 new lenses and the first DSLR to break the 20 megapixel barrier. But what seems to have grabbed most people's attention is the new D40 mid-level DSLR with 10.1-megapixel resolution, JPEGs or 17 RAW files at 6.5fps, nine autofocus points, self-cleaning sensor, 3-inch LCD and "a live-view function that works in a similar way to Canon's higher-end EOS 1-D Mark III, with the ability to both display a live image and output it to a monitor."

The D40 is expected to ship in September with a street price of $1299 for body only or $1499 for the kit which includes the 28mm-135mm IS lens

I'll tell you a secret. I can't get at all excited about JPG Magazine anymore since the whole shakeup with Derek, Heather and "the new JPG" I'm still subscribed to the JPG newsletter, still subscribed to the JPG blog in my feed reader and I've been waiting for something to get excited about but haven't seen anything that fits that bill. They keep announcing all kinds of technical bells and whistles like Facebook plugins that hold but nothing exciting to me as a photographer and a lover of photography. This may be an unfair statement but it's my honest take on it so I'm putting it out here: it seems like Derek and Heather's vision of JPG was a photography magazine that used cool web technologies to process submissions whereas the "new JPG" is a web company and one of their commodities is a magazine. That's just my very outsider take on the situation.

Flickr has just announced upgrades to its online upload utility.

Here at Flickr, we want to make sure your photos arrive safely, efficiently, and with style. That why we've dumped our dusty old web upload form, and replaced it with a super-duper, sexy-ified, shiny new web uploader.

CNET has a very interesting interview with Neal Krawetz, founder of computer security firm Hacker Factor. Of late Krawetz has turned his attention to digital images and the truths and lies they tell. This is particularly interesting to me in a journalism context.

Take USA Today. Every now and again, they put up pictures of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. And they will modify the pictures. I'm not sure who's modifying the pictures--whether it's the photographer submitting it or the intern who's putting them together or someone else at USA Today--but they'll modify it to increase the brightness, for example, on Hillary.

When you increase brightness on a picture, you bring out all the things like wrinkles that really aren't attractive. And they'll soften the picture on Barack Obama to make it look better.

And on helping publications avoid "modified" images.

In my talk, I actually give some pointers for the mass media like Reuters. If they really want to publish pictures that have been unmodified, here's how you can tell. One way is to use quantization table fingerprinting.

If the picture claims to be from a digital camera, and the quantization tables, which are used for compressing the image, don't match the camera, then you know that it's been manipulated. If Reuters had done that, it would have caught the fake photos.

Of course virtually every digital image, just like every darkroom developed image, is going to have some level of modification and manipulation. Burning, dodging, contrast, etc.. The question for me in terms of photojournalism is does it alter the fundamental truth and story of the photo. Photoshopping out a power line crosses that line between truth and fiction for me whereas upping the contrast a bit doesn't. I don't envy the photo editors that have to draw that line between truth and fiction but the lines do have to be drawn. As we've discussed before there are just too many instances of photographers in photojournalism situations taking huge leaps over that truth/fiction line to ignore the problem.

We've discussed the very cool Moo cards and notecards before. Now they've stepped up their game and are now producing stickers. While stickers are very cool and I can come up with several cool uses for them what I really want Moo to start making are post cards. I'd love to take some of my shots and turn them into nice, solid post cards. Is that on the agenda Moo people?