A right-click monitoring and policing system just won't work. First of all, such a system has no way of determining intent. Not every right-click is an attempt to steal an image for redistribution. Also, the system wouldn't work against users sifting through their browser caches for the image, or users performing screen captures.

Besides not distributing your work at all, the only practical solution is the watermarking technique. Thieves, whether out in the real world or on the Internet, love convenience. Anything that takes too long to steal, they'll give up on. If you use a watermark that'd take a large amount of time to doctor out of an image, they'll give up on it and move on.

For those of you who are very serious about protecting your work, digital watermarking services with web spiders would probably be the way to go. Digimarc is one such service whose web spiders can search up to 50 million images on the publically available Internet and notify you automatically on the findings. But like I said, only for the very serious, because costs can add up if you're very productive since their watermarking AND image tracking service is based on the total amount of images marked.

nukem