6 ms·

Liberating out-of-copyright photos from SmartFrame's DRM

157 points by edent 4y ago

baisq 4y ago
> As Bruce Schneier once said: trying to make digital files uncopyable is like trying to make water not wet. Wow, that quote is so profound!
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
  Ice.
  - danmur 4y ago
    Oooh, or electrolysis!
  - masswerk 4y ago
    AKA encryption. But you can still unfreeze it and it'll become wet again…
- judge2020 4y ago
  But is water actually wet? Wouldn’t what makes it wet instead be classified as making the body of water larger instead?
  - ryeights 4y ago
    >Wouldn’t what makes it wet instead be classified as making the body of water larger instead? No. See: wet paint
    - cwillu 4y ago
      See also, for contrast: dry ice
  - probably_wrong 4y ago
    I always informally understood "wet" as something having (excess?) water. In that case, I'd say water is not wet because wetness is the result of adding water to something dry, which doesn't apply to water itself. For water to be wet you'd need "wetness" to be a property you can substract from it, and yet I don't think "dry water" is a concept that exists. So I'm going with "no".
    - yunohn 4y ago
      Tangent: Hydrophobic water - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1Iya8Dpsoew https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1Iya8Dpsoew
    - jwilk 4y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_water https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_water
    - samatman 4y ago
      I take it you're a sedevacantist and ursine outhouse truther as well?
- mistrial9 4y ago
  I know at least two USA people that I grew up with, that have upper-middle class lives now with money made in these consumer digital products spaces. Lots of free-culture people complain (rightly!) but the amount of commerce that is generated with (unfair?) DRM is substantial. As an American, it always hit me that China flagrently ignored copyright, like Disney etc knockoffs.. how can authors get paid? how do photographers get paid to have real lives? It is easy to complain about DRM and I agree, but it is not a complete discussion without the part where creators get paid, somehow.
  - btdmaster 4y ago
    This would be true if copyright were held by authors and lasted within their lifetime, but that has not been the case for a while. The idea that authors were complaining about their work being copied (rather than being flattered by it) or that all artists before copyright were poor due to rampant plagiarism is not accurate at all.[1][2] [1] https://questioncopyright.org/promise https://questioncopyright.org/promise [2] https://blog.ncase.me/why-copies/ https://blog.ncase.me/why-copies/
  - kmeisthax 4y ago
    As one of those free-culture people, my complaint about DRM isn't so much that I can't legally copy the thing that I want to copy. My complaint is that legally empowering DRM has allowed non-creatives to abuse protections intended for copyrighted works to enforce basically any restriction that benefits their business model. e.g. DRM on printer cartridges, garage door openers, or OneWheel batteries is NOT LEGALLY ENFORCEABLE, but merely putting DRM on those things gives you the ability to legally harass lawful competitors for the decade it takes for SCOTUS to say "no, seriously, there is no copyright in your god damned battery DRM". Furthermore, copyright does not protect all creators equally. There are access-to-justice issues in the underlying law, life+70 terms do not help anyone other than large legacy publishers, and the technical restrictions being implemented in the name of trying to make things easier on copyright owners also risks throwing out the entire concept of Fair Use on the Internet. It is very deeply accepted law in the US and other countries that when copyright and free speech are in conflict, free speech generally wins out. However, technical restrictions cannot adjudicate the law; and mandating technical enforcement by means that do not respect exceptions in the law is effectively repealing those exceptions. This, collectively, creates a tiered system in which creators with better representation, deeper back-catalogs, or who create works that are less likely to be flagged by an upload filter are protected by the system, while those who are independent, getting started in their craft, or are just engaged in review or critique are treated as alien and suspect. The current system, inclusive of any proposed changes by the copyright maximalists, will not actually get photographers paid. You cannot represent every copyright dispute in court, and the technical systems intended to substitute for court representation are a mockery of the judicial process. I will agree with you that a lot of people in the tech industry have a "kill and eat the creative class" mentality about them. Their obsession with NFTs - financialization as copyright alternative[0] - is a good case study of that. However, the distrust of copyright and patent law is not merely a matter of demanding free shit. It is learned behavior from decades of copyright maximalists downplaying or ignoring our valid concerns by insisting that if they didn't get everything they wanted, they would take their toys and go home. As for China, they've done way more egregious shit than just not prosecute someone selling Disney knock-offs[1]. They do not have a functional concept of freedom-of-speech[2], and the fact that media companies will shit their pants about knock-off goods but stay silent on actual censorship indicates that their priorities are hella warped. Who cares what we are allowed to say, as long as we can own it, right? And that's really just a microcosm of the whole problem with copyright maximalism. Maximalists don't care about the death of fair use online, as long as they can negotiate their way out of whatever upload filters they shackle everyone else with. They don't care about free speech as long as they are on the inside and know how to negotiate whatever rules are imposed upon them. To them, copyright is not something that protects small creators; it's something that protects them from small creators. [0] Note: a lot of people who bought NFTs did not understand this, and either thought they were buying actual copyright title, or thought that "right-clickers" were literally stealing their work. This was a misreading of the (already-flawed) ideas behind NFTs; the idea was that you could sell artifically-scarce tokens representing an otherwise freely-shareable work. Thus, instead of holding a monopoly on copying and using your monopoly power to fund the creation of new work, you could just rely on selling unregulated speculative instruments to do the same thing. [1] Also, under no circumstances should Disney be allowed to continue owning Mickey Mouse in any country - but that's a slightly different issue. [2] Including the slightly watered-down concepts of "freedom of expression" in other countries. The differences are narrow enough that it shouldn't matter.
chrisseaton 4y ago
> Firstly, they claimed that the photographs were still under copyright. Note that you can in some cases copyright the digitisation of out-of-copyright photos, if there is intellectual creation involved in their restoration or touching up. Simply removing blemishes ins't enough, but I don't know what they did in this case.
- Animats 4y ago
  Note that you can in some cases copyright the digitisation of out-of-copyright photos No. See Bridgeman vs. Corel. That was settled years ago.
  - chrisseaton 4y ago
    > No. See Bridgeman vs. Corel. That was settled years ago. That's a US judgement. Both of the organisations in this case are British. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_v._Corel_Corp.#Relevance_to_UK_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_v._Corel... > As a US court case, Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp. is not binding upon UK courts. And the UK government has a different opinion, which matches what I said. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/copyright-notice-digital-images-photographs-and-the-internet/copyright-notice-digital-images-photographs-and-the-internet https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/copyright-notice-... > However, there is a degree of uncertainty regarding whether copyright can exist in digitised copies of older images for which copyright has expired.
    - Animats 4y ago
      That continues: "However, according to established case law, the courts have said that copyright can only subsist in subject matter that is original in the sense that it is the author’s own ‘intellectual creation’. Given this criterion, it seems unlikely that what is merely a retouched, digitised image of an older work can be considered as ‘original’." There has been a huge attempt by Bridgeman and others to create FUD in this area. It didn't work. Partly because Wikipedia is willing to go to court if necessary.[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Portrait_Gallery_and_Wikimedia_Foundation_copyright_dispute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Portrait_Gallery_and_...
fxtentacle 4y ago
I did a pilot project together with the SmartFrame guys around 2016 and I remember we also discussed this technical weakness of their DRM back then. But it turns out, it doesn't really matter in practice. You removing the DRM from the image is a completely different legal aspect than you saving an unprotected JPEG. Circumvention of the DRM is easier to sue for than pure copyright infringement. SmartFrame's business value is that it protects just enough for an IP insurance to cover you, while not slowing things down unnecessarily with better encryption (that won't stop determined techies anyway). Also, by "recovering" the image in this way, you strip it off IPTC copyright metadata which makes your copy illegal to use in the UK, for example.
- haxorito 4y ago
  2 tea pots to this gentleman, please.
- autoexec 4y ago
  > Also, by "recovering" the image in this way, you strip it off IPTC copyright metadata which makes your copy illegal to use in the UK, for example. Is that still true when there's no copyright on the image? How could that possibly be enforced? If it were read, stripped out, but then replaced (not altered) would that be okay?
  - adolph 4y ago
    Its all fun and games until copyright lawyers get involved. https://www.techdirt.com/company/prenda-law/page/12/ https://www.techdirt.com/company/prenda-law/page/12/
- tjoff 4y ago
  This was always the case with DRM music back in the day, or DVDs after it was cracked etc. Or, the very much infuriating HDCP that was cracked before being in use and that hasn't stopped anything but legal use. Causing immense frustration worldwide. We are poisoning ourselves.
- realusername 4y ago
haxorito 4y ago
DRM is insane concept. I haven’t yet seen one that would actually “work” but like other commentator said main goal is to be obstruction enough to prove that you circumvented copyright policy in first place and to add to that it makes big bosses feel safer. As far as I’m concerned if you have something that is sooo protected don’t upload it to public web; to access anything you have to, first, download its contents, second - eventually decrypt/decode.
- maxloh 4y ago
  Do the Netflix's/Windows's DRM work? Did they ever be bypassed?
  - orthoxerox 4y ago
    There are torrents of Netflix's shows everwhere.
  - realusername 4y ago
    They are bypassed, it's just that cracking groups don't publish their level 1 methods to not get them patched. That's the beauty of the asymmetry against DRM, one file shared is enough to break it.
  - e2le 4y ago
    Yes, you need only take a quick look at the Movie/TV category of most any torrent site. I would argue that you have a better user experience consuming media through torrents as opposed to the 6+ different user hostile streaming services.
    - 14 4y ago
      I’ve noticed this lately. Found a streaming site and it just has so much more content and the site is so well organized and I’ve found lots of good shows on the front page. Netflix is lacking good suggestions and Amazon video really sucks and is more trying to push paid for videos which I want nothing to do with.
  - 4y ago
adolph 4y ago
This is not Digital Rights Management (DRM). At best SmartFrame's website claims "Protect your images from right-clicks, drag-and-drop actions and other theft attempts – even site-scraping bots."[0] They are using vanilla JavaScript to perform this "protection" not DRM. The author's claim of an authorization header is not convincing. That header identifies the site pulling the images and using the SmartFrame API, allowing them to do the "Detailed image analytics."[0] 0. https://smartframe.io/content-owners/ https://smartframe.io/content-owners/
- robin_reala 4y ago
  The request fails if you change the header, and it’s the same header across multiple sites. So it doesn’t really do anything for stats.

157 points by edent 4y ago

> As Bruce Schneier once said: trying to make digital files uncopyable is like trying to make water not wet. Wow, that quote is so profound!

2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
Ice.
- danmur 4y ago
  Oooh, or electrolysis!
- masswerk 4y ago
  AKA encryption. But you can still unfreeze it and it'll become wet again…
judge2020 4y ago
But is water actually wet? Wouldn’t what makes it wet instead be classified as making the body of water larger instead?
- ryeights 4y ago
  >Wouldn’t what makes it wet instead be classified as making the body of water larger instead? No. See: wet paint
  - cwillu 4y ago
    See also, for contrast: dry ice
- probably_wrong 4y ago
  I always informally understood "wet" as something having (excess?) water. In that case, I'd say water is not wet because wetness is the result of adding water to something dry, which doesn't apply to water itself. For water to be wet you'd need "wetness" to be a property you can substract from it, and yet I don't think "dry water" is a concept that exists. So I'm going with "no".
  - yunohn 4y ago
    Tangent: Hydrophobic water - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1Iya8Dpsoew https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1Iya8Dpsoew
  - jwilk 4y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_water https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_water
  - samatman 4y ago
    I take it you're a sedevacantist and ursine outhouse truther as well?
mistrial9 4y ago
I know at least two USA people that I grew up with, that have upper-middle class lives now with money made in these consumer digital products spaces. Lots of free-culture people complain (rightly!) but the amount of commerce that is generated with (unfair?) DRM is substantial. As an American, it always hit me that China flagrently ignored copyright, like Disney etc knockoffs.. how can authors get paid? how do photographers get paid to have real lives? It is easy to complain about DRM and I agree, but it is not a complete discussion without the part where creators get paid, somehow.
- btdmaster 4y ago
  This would be true if copyright were held by authors and lasted within their lifetime, but that has not been the case for a while. The idea that authors were complaining about their work being copied (rather than being flattered by it) or that all artists before copyright were poor due to rampant plagiarism is not accurate at all.[1][2] [1] https://questioncopyright.org/promise https://questioncopyright.org/promise [2] https://blog.ncase.me/why-copies/ https://blog.ncase.me/why-copies/
- kmeisthax 4y ago
  As one of those free-culture people, my complaint about DRM isn't so much that I can't legally copy the thing that I want to copy. My complaint is that legally empowering DRM has allowed non-creatives to abuse protections intended for copyrighted works to enforce basically any restriction that benefits their business model. e.g. DRM on printer cartridges, garage door openers, or OneWheel batteries is NOT LEGALLY ENFORCEABLE, but merely putting DRM on those things gives you the ability to legally harass lawful competitors for the decade it takes for SCOTUS to say "no, seriously, there is no copyright in your god damned battery DRM". Furthermore, copyright does not protect all creators equally. There are access-to-justice issues in the underlying law, life+70 terms do not help anyone other than large legacy publishers, and the technical restrictions being implemented in the name of trying to make things easier on copyright owners also risks throwing out the entire concept of Fair Use on the Internet. It is very deeply accepted law in the US and other countries that when copyright and free speech are in conflict, free speech generally wins out. However, technical restrictions cannot adjudicate the law; and mandating technical enforcement by means that do not respect exceptions in the law is effectively repealing those exceptions. This, collectively, creates a tiered system in which creators with better representation, deeper back-catalogs, or who create works that are less likely to be flagged by an upload filter are protected by the system, while those who are independent, getting started in their craft, or are just engaged in review or critique are treated as alien and suspect. The current system, inclusive of any proposed changes by the copyright maximalists, will not actually get photographers paid. You cannot represent every copyright dispute in court, and the technical systems intended to substitute for court representation are a mockery of the judicial process. I will agree with you that a lot of people in the tech industry have a "kill and eat the creative class" mentality about them. Their obsession with NFTs - financialization as copyright alternative[0] - is a good case study of that. However, the distrust of copyright and patent law is not merely a matter of demanding free shit. It is learned behavior from decades of copyright maximalists downplaying or ignoring our valid concerns by insisting that if they didn't get everything they wanted, they would take their toys and go home. As for China, they've done way more egregious shit than just not prosecute someone selling Disney knock-offs[1]. They do not have a functional concept of freedom-of-speech[2], and the fact that media companies will shit their pants about knock-off goods but stay silent on actual censorship indicates that their priorities are hella warped. Who cares what we are allowed to say, as long as we can own it, right? And that's really just a microcosm of the whole problem with copyright maximalism. Maximalists don't care about the death of fair use online, as long as they can negotiate their way out of whatever upload filters they shackle everyone else with. They don't care about free speech as long as they are on the inside and know how to negotiate whatever rules are imposed upon them. To them, copyright is not something that protects small creators; it's something that protects them from small creators. [0] Note: a lot of people who bought NFTs did not understand this, and either thought they were buying actual copyright title, or thought that "right-clickers" were literally stealing their work. This was a misreading of the (already-flawed) ideas behind NFTs; the idea was that you could sell artifically-scarce tokens representing an otherwise freely-shareable work. Thus, instead of holding a monopoly on copying and using your monopoly power to fund the creation of new work, you could just rely on selling unregulated speculative instruments to do the same thing. [1] Also, under no circumstances should Disney be allowed to continue owning Mickey Mouse in any country - but that's a slightly different issue. [2] Including the slightly watered-down concepts of "freedom of expression" in other countries. The differences are narrow enough that it shouldn't matter.

chrisseaton 4y ago

> Firstly, they claimed that the photographs were still under copyright. Note that you can in some cases copyright the digitisation of out-of-copyright photos, if there is intellectual creation involved in their restoration or touching up. Simply removing blemishes ins't enough, but I don't know what they did in this case.

Animats 4y ago
Note that you can in some cases copyright the digitisation of out-of-copyright photos No. See Bridgeman vs. Corel. That was settled years ago.
- chrisseaton 4y ago
  > No. See Bridgeman vs. Corel. That was settled years ago. That's a US judgement. Both of the organisations in this case are British. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_v._Corel_Corp.#Relevance_to_UK_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_v._Corel... > As a US court case, Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp. is not binding upon UK courts. And the UK government has a different opinion, which matches what I said. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/copyright-notice-digital-images-photographs-and-the-internet/copyright-notice-digital-images-photographs-and-the-internet https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/copyright-notice-... > However, there is a degree of uncertainty regarding whether copyright can exist in digitised copies of older images for which copyright has expired.
  - Animats 4y ago
    That continues: "However, according to established case law, the courts have said that copyright can only subsist in subject matter that is original in the sense that it is the author’s own ‘intellectual creation’. Given this criterion, it seems unlikely that what is merely a retouched, digitised image of an older work can be considered as ‘original’." There has been a huge attempt by Bridgeman and others to create FUD in this area. It didn't work. Partly because Wikipedia is willing to go to court if necessary.[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Portrait_Gallery_and_Wikimedia_Foundation_copyright_dispute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Portrait_Gallery_and_...

fxtentacle 4y ago

I did a pilot project together with the SmartFrame guys around 2016 and I remember we also discussed this technical weakness of their DRM back then. But it turns out, it doesn't really matter in practice. You removing the DRM from the image is a completely different legal aspect than you saving an unprotected JPEG. Circumvention of the DRM is easier to sue for than pure copyright infringement. SmartFrame's business value is that it protects just enough for an IP insurance to cover you, while not slowing things down unnecessarily with better encryption (that won't stop determined techies anyway). Also, by "recovering" the image in this way, you strip it off IPTC copyright metadata which makes your copy illegal to use in the UK, for example.

haxorito 4y ago
2 tea pots to this gentleman, please.
autoexec 4y ago
> Also, by "recovering" the image in this way, you strip it off IPTC copyright metadata which makes your copy illegal to use in the UK, for example. Is that still true when there's no copyright on the image? How could that possibly be enforced? If it were read, stripped out, but then replaced (not altered) would that be okay?
- adolph 4y ago
  Its all fun and games until copyright lawyers get involved. https://www.techdirt.com/company/prenda-law/page/12/ https://www.techdirt.com/company/prenda-law/page/12/
tjoff 4y ago
This was always the case with DRM music back in the day, or DVDs after it was cracked etc. Or, the very much infuriating HDCP that was cracked before being in use and that hasn't stopped anything but legal use. Causing immense frustration worldwide. We are poisoning ourselves.
realusername 4y ago

haxorito 4y ago

DRM is insane concept. I haven’t yet seen one that would actually “work” but like other commentator said main goal is to be obstruction enough to prove that you circumvented copyright policy in first place and to add to that it makes big bosses feel safer. As far as I’m concerned if you have something that is sooo protected don’t upload it to public web; to access anything you have to, first, download its contents, second - eventually decrypt/decode.

maxloh 4y ago
Do the Netflix's/Windows's DRM work? Did they ever be bypassed?
- orthoxerox 4y ago
  There are torrents of Netflix's shows everwhere.
- realusername 4y ago
  They are bypassed, it's just that cracking groups don't publish their level 1 methods to not get them patched. That's the beauty of the asymmetry against DRM, one file shared is enough to break it.
- e2le 4y ago
  Yes, you need only take a quick look at the Movie/TV category of most any torrent site. I would argue that you have a better user experience consuming media through torrents as opposed to the 6+ different user hostile streaming services.
  - 14 4y ago
    I’ve noticed this lately. Found a streaming site and it just has so much more content and the site is so well organized and I’ve found lots of good shows on the front page. Netflix is lacking good suggestions and Amazon video really sucks and is more trying to push paid for videos which I want nothing to do with.
- 4y ago

adolph 4y ago

This is not Digital Rights Management (DRM). At best SmartFrame's website claims "Protect your images from right-clicks, drag-and-drop actions and other theft attempts – even site-scraping bots."[0] They are using vanilla JavaScript to perform this "protection" not DRM. The author's claim of an authorization header is not convincing. That header identifies the site pulling the images and using the SmartFrame API, allowing them to do the "Detailed image analytics."[0] 0. https://smartframe.io/content-owners/ https://smartframe.io/content-owners/

robin_reala 4y ago
The request fails if you change the header, and it’s the same header across multiple sites. So it doesn’t really do anything for stats.