Watermarking Images

[Clay]

This has been suggested by a few people .. and I would like to have more opinions before I make my final decision.

Watermarking is basically adding the gigposters.com logo to every image .. to help prevent the theft and reproduction of poster images.

On the downside .. it does affect the appearance of the poster image .. and it is questionable if it really would prevent anything.

Please feel free to discuss this all you like.

Example:



I am making this a sticky thread for a couple of days...

[piemel]

I would be totally for this... the intrusion of the art is very minimal (see the example from the Expresso Bean watermark on the Hampton poster)...

The main advantage is that it will make it harder for people to rip the posters from this site and use it for bootlegging or other purposes. As well know we have had some bootleg operations exposed in the past few months and it is very likely that they got their images form this site.

The watermarks are not going to be a fix-it-all... people can photoshop etcetera but at least it prevents or considerably slows down the ripping from this site

[raindog138]

oh - well if it's gonna be that small - i dont care.

i thought it was gonna be like across the whole poster like i have seen on some other sites. i was under this assumption when i voted.

[standard]

would this not mean re-compressing already compressed images? I assume this'd be done automatically. Any tests to see if it artifacts up the jpgs? I know that generally it's frowned upon to compress the same thing twice cos it gets messy.

[piemel]

I am actually dumbfounded that artists would not vote in favor of watermarking thier posters on ANY site.. beit here on gigposters or their own sites...

The recent history has shown that bootleggers use sites like GP to make cheap bootleg offsets... watermarking will make it a very very time consuming task and hence impractical.

Other sites like Expresso Beans are already doing this which is kind of ironic because a lot of the pictures on that site are ripped from gigposters

Artists should protect their images and I think we can all agree that the intrusion is very minimal

[Brad]

a watermark that small would be a ten second photoshop fix. anyone wanting to profit from bootlegging the posters would gladly invest ten seconds in photoshop for free money.

[stinkbait]

in reality if you are even halfway proficient with photoshop a watermark won't stop much. They are easy to remove. They may deter a few people but the real problem bootleggers will always find a way to get what they want. I prefer to see images as they are meant to be seen. I don't even like bar's or sponsors having logos on the poster.

[piemel]

i give up

[Brad]

don't give up.

[stinkbait]

i give up

Aw don't take it too hard little fella. All your points are completely valid. people just suck. I'd hate to see Clay go to all the work for what I think would be a very minimal deterrent. That crazy Canuck does plenty for us already.