Thanks for the links, Arista. I have bookmarked them and will study the tech at leisure.

What follows is --pure--- opinion. Ignore, agree, or flame as desired.

While watermarking and filing for copyrights, and other legal methods of protection are all good, and I approve of having the tech available for legitimate uses, I also believe that as a deterant to theft, they have a basic flaw.

There are people who just don't care. Or they don't think the laws of the artist's country of origin affect them.

As mentioned, my answer to the situation is to only put up on the web those images with a size, and a compression ratio, such that if a thief wants to create a print, or a large wallpaper version (the two most common reasons for art theft) he would have to increase the size to the point where the compression artifacts would be clearly visible, reducing the usage the thief would get from it. And I reserve the high quality versions for legitimate inquiries.

(grin) I'm sure this topic gets a lot of airing from time to time on every art forum on the web, so I won't carry on any longer. Every artist must choose his/her own path. I just hope I have given folks another insight on the problem and possible solutions.

RosemaryR
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"This...this is magnificent!"
"Oh, yeah. Ooooo. Aaaaah. That's how it starts.
Then, later, there's ...running. And....screaming."