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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: AOL web troubles.. New AOL speedup seems to be a slowdown
On Friday, January 30, 2004 2:20 PM [GMT-5=EST], JC Dill <[email protected]> wrote: > At 09:43 PM 1/29/2004, "Brian Bruns" <[email protected]> wrote: >> Properly implemented watermarking won't be affected by the recompression. >> It may not be as clear to the program as it would be if it was in its old >> format, but its still legible. > > That's *visible* watermarking, not invisible *digital* watermarking which > is hidden in the image file and marks the image as the property of the > copyright owner. If AOL's recompression technique is stripping out the > digital watermark (can anyone here verify this?), then: > > AOL is copying and redistributing the image in a new format *without the > permission of the copyright holder* in a way that A) makes AOL money and B) > removes protections that the copyright holder had placed on the image to > help keep third parties from reproducing the image without permission. > > and in doing so: > > IMHO they are infringing on the copyright of those who have placed the > digital watermark in the image. > > jc As far as I know, they don't tamper with digital watermarks. Frankly, unless you know the program that created them, its very hard to figure out where a digital watermark is, as they are designed to be completely transparent and invisible to pretty much everything but the identifying program. If they were visible, it would be simple enough to strip it out and take the image. Visible watermarking shouldn't be too badly affected by the compression either - I guess I could throw up some of my samples if people here would be interested in the difference in quality between normal images, AOL ART compressed images, etc so you can get an idea if you dont already know what we are talking about. The most common side affect of the AOL ART compression is color banding - where smooth gradients are turned into color streaks of solid colors. The other thing is loss of detail on areas where color is very similar (ie: skin tones). -- Brian Bruns The Summit Open Source Development Group Open Solutions For A Closed World / Anti-Spam Resources http://www.sosdg.org The AHBL - http://www.ahbl.org
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