Recently a photographer won a major court-case against a client that was using his images without paying for them. Other companies have been caught taking pictures off of Flickr and using them in ad-campaigns.
Sharing online is great and many photographers do so, but it does not constitute a right of anyone to come in and use these pictures to their own ends. The problem, however, is how to prove ownership of a picture. How do I prove that a picture on my Flickr account really has been taken by me?
Watermarking is used often for this purpose. Unfortunately the watermark can usually be removed with some photoshopping. The way I would prove it instead, is through the RAW original. Only I have that for my photos, nobody else. But if I need to send that in as proof, I've just given away my trump-card. I can no longer prove this is my RAW file, since there now exist copies.
This brings me to the big idea: Can't someone (preferably one of the photo-sharing sites, like Flickr or Photoshelter) write some software that can take a RAW file and a JPEG created from that RAW file and prove statistically that the one resulted from the other? There are potentially a lot of factors to take into account (straightening, cropping, colour changes, etc.) but at a mathematical level there should be enough info to work with. Perhaps Lightroom's XMP file (that records all the changes done to a RAW file) could be used for this purpose. Aperture has similar files containing processing instructions.
In any case, the photo-sharing site then can mark the photograph as being "registered", in other words: the person behind the account is the actual person who took the shot. The site can then remove the RAW file, or even keep it around in a secure place, should anybody demand further proof.
In effect Photoshelter or Flickr then becomes a trusted third party. A notary for images, of sorts. Not only will this settle many (probably not all) disputes, it will also draw in a lot of photographers who, until now, have been nervous about putting the images online.
Just to make this clear: I own the rights to this idea, which I will give up as soon as a photo-sharing service comes up with this kind of a services and gives me a life-time membership for it :-).
