Archive for the ‘e-Security’ Category
These days sharing your images online and protecting them from undesired/unlawful use has been seen as a misnomer. Luckily there are methods to protect your works if you desire to retain all your rights to your photos.
Display with Flash Viewer
There are plenty of free and easy methods to display photographs. Many of these methods require yout to have a basic understanding of html, but many have clear instructions on how to set them up on your website. The one’s I’ve previewed don’t have “save as image” protection automatically, so you’ll have to choose one that makes it the easiest
While this method is helpful, it doesn’t stop the infamous “Prnt Scrn” method of copying visual works. It also requires that you have a web host and website/blog with considerable coding freedom. (aka not Flickr/Picasa Web etc) Comes to play two other methods.
Use Tiny Thumbnails
Most “infringers” will want to enlarge photos for social media and background use. While this method doesn’t allow users to see details, it gives the viewer a visual “summary” of the works.
Watermark your Images
My friend Jillian Betterly used this method to preview wedding photos for her clients. She would display samples of photos she took with a heavy watermark of her logo. She placed the watermarks right above the subject of interest within the photo, such as smiling faces.Clients or anybody wanting a copy of the photos would submit orders and she would deliver their memories without watermarks. The watermark would still allow prospective purchasers to see the areas of interest within the photos, but make it indesireable for them to copy it for their personal use without paying for her ” visual memory capturing” and printing services. This method is also used by many stock photo purchase services.
Using all three methods together and tweaking them to your liking you’ll make it difficult for would be infringers to take your works.
I’ll often argue that artists should be able to desire how their works are licensed or ultimately used. The methods mentioned above are for artists who desire to retain their rights completedly under copyright law.
For the people who desire that art be ‘released into the wild’, with no desire for profit, there are alternative licensing schemes. We’ll discuss Creative Commons Licensing schemes in the next post!
At least two New Jersey law firms that were victimized by phony check scams have gone to court seeking to get the money back from the banks that handled the checks.
Freedman & Gersten in Hasbrouck Heights, N.J., claims it wired $236,659 to a company in South Korea based on a check that turned out to be fake, while Levitan & Frieland of Florham Park, N.J., has lodged similar allegations.
Freedman & Gersten is suing Bank of America, on whose assurances it says it relied when it deposited a $274,705 client check in its attorney trust account and wired most of the money overseas.
The bogus check, received last Feb. 6, was made out to the firm, was labeled “Official Check” and appeared to be drawn on the Citibank account of Weltronics Component Ltd. in Hong Kong and according to the complaint in Freedman & Gersten v. Bank of America, 09-cv-5351, filed in Bergen County Superior Court on Sept. 10 and removed to federal court in Newark, N.J., on Oct. 20.
The client’s instructions, two days later, to wire $128,600 to Nassco Korea Co., raised a red flag because a new client in a foreign country was asking the firm to pay money to a third-party foreign entity. So before depositing the check into its trust account at the Glen Rock, N.J., branch, “in an abundance of caution,” it sent a copy to Bank of America asking it to contact Citibank to make sure the check was good, the firm alleges.
The Washington Post – Organized cyber gangs in Eastern Europe are increasingly preying on small and midsize companies in the United States, setting off a multimillion-dollar online crime wave that has begun to worry the nation’s largest financial institutions. A task force representing the financial industry sent out an alert Friday outlining the problem and urging its members to start using many of the precautions that detect consumer bank and credit card fraud. “In the past six months, financial institutions, security companies, the media and law enforcement agencies are all reporting a significant increase in funds transfer fraud involving the exploitation of valid banking credentials belonging to small and medium-sized businesses,” reads the confidential alert sent to members of the Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center, an industry group created to share data about critical threats to the financial sector. The group is operated and funded by such financial heavyweights as American Express, Bank of America, Citigroup, Fannie Mae and Morgan Stanley. Because the targets tend to be smaller, the attacks have attracted little of the notoriety that has followed larger-scale breaches at big retailers and government agencies. But the industry group said some companies have suffered hundreds of thousands of dollars or more in losses.