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Canon Files For DSLR Iris Registration Patent
An anonymous reader writes "Canon has filed for a patent for using iris watermarking (as in the iris of your eye) to take photographer's copyright protection to the next level. You set up the camera to capture an image of your eye through the viewfinder. Once captured, this biological reference is embedded as metadata into every photo you take. Canon claims this will help with copyright infringement of photos online."
remove the meta data?
Now if I need to break into someplace that use iris biometrics I can just get that from a photo off of Myspace!
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
What about editing metadata?
And also help to track down that pesky journalist/blogger/dissident always posting images the government doesn't like? No, I'm not referring to any government in particular.
So we'll have journalist's contact lenses if those things become the DRM of digital photography?
Like with most advancements in modern electronics, this one does not go down my throat without a huge grain of salt.
I'm an infovore...
sheeple
sheeple who love sheeple
are the loveliest sheeple in the world
So does reflecto-porn count as prior art? I mean, if you consider "unique image of the photographer embedded in the photograph" as prior art.
meh
That sounds pretty easy to strip out after the fact. Or, for that matter, to add in. What makes this any better than adding your name or email address to the metadata, as most cameras allow you to do now?
Proving an image is yours generally isn't even a problem. Online images are lower resolution versions of the originals, only the photographer will be able to produce an image with many times the quality of the online version. The problem is a) finding out that your images are being used without your permission, and b) getting it to stop. Both of these are made much more difficult by the global nature of the Internet, and neither of them are made any easier by this iris watermarking, as far as I can tell.
... the one-eyed man is king (but meta tagged).
Run and catch, run and catch, the lamb is caught in the blackberry patch.
Is there some form of public/private key crypto? Otherwise you'd have the same issue with forged signatures or lifted thumb prints.
"Ooo, hey I just extracted ur iris pic and watermarked my baby pics with it. Now you're busted for kiddie porn. LoLz."
I don't know that it will achieve its intended purpose, but nevertheless, as a concept, that is shockingly genius in its elegance and simplicity. Damn you Canon, for not waiting for me to come up with it first.
It strikes me that the patent system is much like Slashdot in that only one person gets to shout "First Patent!" whilst everyone else with the same idea is downmodded to oblivion.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
Well, that sounds silly. I can't imagine that it'd be a good idea to make available one's biometric identifiers ready-encoded, still less wise to place that into the metadata. Which can be, quite simply, either stripped out, replaced or repurposed.
It might make some sense to embed some form of identifier within the image itself using old-fashioned steganography, where at least it's harder (though still absolutely possible) to remove or acquire, but, as it stands, this proposal seems to embody the worst of both worlds: we'll make your identifying information publically available and in an easy-to-remove format! Net gain: um...?
Still, I guess I can hope they'll patent it only to prevent other companies from implementing stupidity.
Or don't buy the camera?
This is something Canon would tout as a feature of their camera, for which artists would pay a premium, so that they could more easily prove that a particular photo belongs to them.
Keep in mind these are people who (1) earn their daily bread by taking amazing photos, and (2) often have to endure years and years of dry spells before one particular photo hits the big time and generates widespread interest. They have a very strong interest in controlling the reproduction and use of their photos, so they can get paid for their years of effort. A feature like this, sort of an automatic unfakeable "signature" embedded in each frame, would make it much easier for them to prove that a given photo is their property.
You might not like that of course, but that just means you're not a photographer. Presumably when it comes to whatever you do creatively, that takes years of discipline and effort to do, and which puts the food on your table, is not something you'd like people to just be able to duplicate and distribute randomly and broadly without even asking you first.
Think of it as the equivalent of your engraving your SSN on your very expensive tools, so that if they're ripped off you can prove they're yours.
As more and more governments and business turn to biometric data for confirming identity, and identity theft becomes a more and more prevalent problem, Canon's solution is to embed your biometric data in publicly distributed images?
Someone would just navigate to your flickr page, do a quick google search to find your real name (or read it from your page), look you up in publicly accessible databases to acquire your address etc, and then just rip your biometric information right out of the images you post! As wikipedia points out there are commercially available fake iris contact lenses designed to defeat these scanners - previously, the problem was only in acquiring someone's iris. Not to mention that in the future as biometrics become more popular we're likely to see people's irises, fingerprints, and other information used in household readers for providing authentication to software and internet applications - much like the fingerprint scanners we're seeing on more and more laptops.
Publically distributing your iris is a bad idea now, but a terrible idea in the future.
Canon has filed for a patent for using iris watermarking (as in the iris of your eye) to take photographer's copyright protection to the next level.
No, putting your photos on a CD or DVD and then following these instructions takes it to the next level. It helps that a)you have the RAW files and nobody else does and b)most cameras encode their serial number into the EXIF data (or similar for a RAW image), and if you have proof of ownership of said camera...
I didn't see anything in the patent summary provided by the linked site that related to ease of copyright enforcement. Just:
Alternatively, by embedding personal data which is biological information in the image of a subject as an electronic watermark, falsification can be prevented more robustly.
Wow, you don't say. We can do that now- it's called Digimarc. They'll even crawl the web for you and look for images with your Digimarc watermark. Too bad it costs about a zillion dollars- their pricing model means that only a small number of pros use it (and you pay for both per-image watermarking, AND the services like web crawling.) This technology is sufficiently expensive and limited in scope to mean that it will never make it into anything except the 1D series cameras- it probably wouldn't even make it into the _0D series.
I really don't see an application for this technology, except for *maybe* press agencies, where they want to (more) easily track who took what photo. This is a fairly painless way of doing so; you no longer need to track who has what camera (Canon and Nikon provide loaners for repairs and loaners for special events, which means that no, it's not 1 person, 1 camera. Pro's also often shoot with more than one body.)
Though really, they could do the same thing with a microSD slot (where shooting preferences could be stored, too) for a lot cheaper. The only thing this gets them is more "proof", maybe- if they can somehow provide tamper-proof metadata (supposedly, the "data verification kit" from Canon provides verifiable images, but I've never seen even the most basic description of how it works.)
Please help metamoderate.
Can we get a standalone USB Iris scanner for Photoshop?
I know a lot of people who would benefit from this type of watermarking.
It would certainly become useful on Art social networking sites like mine.
So, the raw image (or high resolution JPEG or other) is watermarked. Seems to me that when the original image is re-encoded for publication that detail will be lost.
Don't try to out wierd me, three-eyes. I get stranger things than you, free with my breakfast cereal. --Zaphod Beeblebr
Not in the metadata, but the patent doesn't specify. Digimarc does this; they try to embed information into the image via stenography. However, it must be quite redundant, cover the entire image, and not affect the output, through all kinds of filters that post processing entails. This is a difficult problem, IMO.
For example, jpg and several other popular formats allow for pixel info that is not displayed, but that is an easy target. in true steg, the information is interwoven with part of an image which are "busy" as so bits flipped expressing for encoding - or spread so widely that single,subtle shifts - are not intrusive. Filters can reduce the number of matching bits down to a statistical norm, but the image quality changes. Also, the steg must be impervious to cropping, rotation and flipping.
I can see this being viable for commercial uses, but then again, if you're caught with unlicensed photos, all revenue from things they are attached to are on the table for awards. Most pros do not steal commercial images - one's reputation is finished.
Online, I think if you succeed in finding your photos via a crawler that matches based on this info, you're then left splitting fair use from not. Most online uses are fair, actually, since they're not for profit. Now remember, you can crawl images now and sniff out similars - its painful and error-prone, and this doesn't make it easier.
So then after you dice through all your hits, you find your photo being used [for example] to sell Cisco hardware for billions, you then write and ask for compensation, showing them the proof. And...up to this point, people were stopped at this last step? Courts look at the two images now and didn't believe they were the same? Smells like gimmick.
How often are images stolen and used for commercial purposes? I really dont know.
And also help to track down that pesky journalist/blogger/dissident always posting images the government doesn't like? No, I'm not referring to any government in particular.
They'd be storing a *representation* of the iris image data. Useless for matching. Watermarking the actual image is only mentioned very briefly and in passing, in a sort of "oh, and you could watermark the image with this" kind of way.
Given Canon's bread and butter with pro cameras are the press (your cute digital rebel costs $700; a 1DMk3 is $4k), they're unlikely to do anything that will piss them off.
Please help metamoderate.
Does this mean someone could add the watermark/metadata for their own iris on a previously unprotected image, thus making it look like they were the author instead?
like maybe the print screen button
finger prints from the shutter release button will be easer to scan.
New DSLRs start having "live-view" on the LCD like the P&S. In the near future not all pictures will be taken from a viewfinder. A finger still needs to press the shutter button, though.
Most modern cameras have a LCD screen. That means it's going to be impractical to force the user to always look into the viewfinder. Also most decent cameras can take photos on a timer. That means the eye data must be stored.
But this in turn makes it very easy to store anything as eye data. I could use my cat's eye for identification. Or find a high resolution photo on the web, print it, and try to get the camera to accept somebody else's eye.
Really, who does that this days? if this is suppose to work for any person on any camera they would have to register the iris every time a photo is taken. If it's registered before taking photos, then anybody using your camera can take photos that can be traced back to you, not them.
It's neat, but I'm not sold. The real issue with it all, is not proving that it's your photograph. RAW files, EXIF data, and having a whole sequence of photographs instead of one, can help prove that a photograph actually belongs to you. The issue more often than not is commercial photographers not going after those that infringe upon their copyrights. I know it sounds draconian, but that's life. I love my Creative Commons as much as the next *nix user, but if you're trying to make your living off of it, you can't hand it away.
Using a biometric identifier for watermarking is pointless and only broadcasts your biometric id across the world. Biometric ids are there for proving that you are you, not that something belongs to you.
..." into the images. If, for some reason, you want to sign your images digitally, sign them digitally.
If you have a good watermarking scheme, embed a string like "This image is Copyright 2008 by
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
As said above: Turn it off, or don't buy that camera. I'm not particularly sold on it myself, so I won't buy it (that and I shoot Nikon, and I've already invested in lenses).
Enable Iris Watermark? [YES] [NO]
I assume it's not embedding raw biometric data, but rather a cryptographic hash of your cryptographic data and the image data. You know, like a PGP signature.
Of course, since it took me about 0.3 seconds to come up with this, I'm sure it's beyond the capabilities of Canon's entire R&D division, huh?
No, you want euthaenesia. You just don't know it yet.
Yah baby, now reach for the kleenex. Atta boy
If it's not defeated, watermarking does make it easier to find copies of your images. You only have to process each image on the web once to find your watermark. Without watermarking, you'd have to do a pairwise comparison between every image on the web and every image of your own.
I agree that this sounds easy to fake. However, cryptography is not a silver bullet that one can incorporate into any technology idea and have it make the whole thing work. Cryptography is a tool, like a screwdriver, and it can be used for some jobs and not others.
Speaking as a photographer who has had his work used in print and on-line, (including photos of Mexico used in brochures put out by the Mexico department of Tourism), I can say that *NOBODY* deserves to get paid for mediocre work, and if you're going through a 'dry spell', then you're doing mediocre work.
Wot?! My robot can't take pictures?
Fight back, tag !gayyouhomophobicbastard
just put your signature on a piece of paper, scan it with a flatbed scanner and save as a couple of the popular file formats used for computer graphics (jpg, png, gif) then resize them small enough to not be noticed and paste them on to your photos you want copyrighted/trademarked whatever, then nobody will know they are there unless they zoom in to 400% and look for the signature in a specified location, but since you keep all that your own little secret nobody knows they are there unless you need it to defend your self in the court of law...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
...you Guilty of Paedophilia, because your iris code - as identified from the metadata of images you have shared on Flickr - has been found in images taken by a Kiddie-Fiddler in Thailand and posted to irootkids.com
Your protestations that such data is insecure and easily manipulated is nonce-sense, for you are a nonce - as proven by the facts that someone with a hex-editor and too much time on his hands has implicated you in such heinous acts, your credit card records that show that you ate at a Thai restaurant, the half-remembered recollection of the waitress that you ordered Tom-Yum soup and the fact that your son's name is Tom.
And now, on a more serious note...
Surely anyone involved in professional production of such materials these days would "file the serial numbers off" before distribution, meaning they'd strip as much of the metadata off as they could and would turn such features off in cameras they used. However, there would be a sufficient number of people who didn't do that to make it worth pursuing leads that identified a particular camera or photographer. My question is, how easy would it be to forge such incriminating photographs? If you knew a particular politician owned a particular camera model, and you could get a couple of sample images from it, would it be worth your while having someone in Thailand take pervy pics with the same model and passing all that information over to someone who could produce a believable hybrid file with the pervy images and the real meta-data?
Is it too much to ask that we kick the homophobia? Some people are gay; get over it.
Actually watermark the image. You know, actually modify the image with text, your name, company, firm, whatever. So you can easily view the image, but it prominently displays who it belongs to. When you actually sell it, give them the un-watermarked version.
This seems all quite innocuous.
The system is completely voluntary, so privacy concerns should be kept to an absolute minimum... The only reason you'd want to use this system is to permanently attach you identity to your photos, thus intentionally sacrificing a bit of privacy.
In return, you receive nearly-absolute proof of ownership for said photos. This prevents some twat from pulling my photo off of Flickr, selling it to Reuters, and pocketing the profits. However, it doesn't do anything prevent the photo from being copied or propagating across the web (which is something that most "traditional" DRM systems would do).
It seems like a very nice compromise wherein the rights of the content producers and end-users are both protected. End-users are free to do what they please with the content (a la Creative Commons), while the content-producers may retain ownership of their own work, and reserve commercial rights to that work (which they're perfectly entitled to do!).
I must say that I like this quite a bit.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
What happens when someone else takes a picture with the camera, if it stores the iris imprint, I will be getting credit for someone else's crappy photography!
...that the intartubes are going to be "crawling" with thousands/millions of watermark search spiders, each one downloading image after image? Over and over again every time someone posts a new image with their watermark? Then another run the week after to just "make sure" it hasn't happened yet? Just to check to make sure they haven't been copied? Might make SPAM and P2P tunes sharing look like a minor bandwith issue at that point.
the results of such technology. It's called Science Fiction. Remember 'Minority Report'? It and stories like it are proof that any 'infallible or ingeniously indispensable technology can be both wrong or misused.
Moral of the story here is that any theft-proof or idiot-proof identification method remains so only as long has it has never been tested against either.
The second thing to go wrong with this type of technology is that someone will copyright their retina pattern and there will be copyright disputes as to who owns what all over again.
sad, sad, sad....
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
Comment removed based on user account deletion
i didn't know "copyright infringement of photos online" was a problem
And then there's that James Bond movie scene
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
If you had a reading age above five, you'd have figured out that he knows homosexual people call themselves gay, and that he was objecting to the word used to describe himself and others being also used to indicate that something was silly, useless or pointless.
So, in short, simple terms:
Gay -> Homosexual = OK.
Gay -> Waste of Space = Not OK.
How the heck do you fit an accurate iris scanner into the viewfinder of a camera? Most DSLR viewfinders are pretty tiny, and packed full of, you know, actually important stuff. And most point and shoots I've seen recently have absolutely horrible viewfinders (heck, I've read of a few manufacturers omitting them ).
Where the heck will they fit it all?
Come on now. You might as well argue that locking your front door is pointless because there are many ways to pick a lock, if you are talented and persistent and resourceful enough, and in the end you can just hire a Mission : Impossible team for $10,000,000 to silently dig a tunnel under the house and break in through the basement.
The point isn't to make theft impossible in the sense that it would violate the laws of physics. The idea is just to make it more expensive, so that, ideally, it's cheaper to pay for the work in an honest way than to steal it.
In any event, there is obviously a correlation between how expensive and difficult it is to steal and make it pay, and how much stealing goes on. Anything that makes stealing even slightly more expensive is going to reduce the amount of it (more or less driving the cheap criminals out of the "market"). If it costs less than the amount of theft prevented, it's worth it.
"homephobic basement dweller"?
Dude, he's the one that has it tough!
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
Duh, just convert it to JPG with a very tiny amount of compression and you've destroyed the watermark with only a 1% loss in quality.
it's hard to have any problem with gay people. they're the only kind of aberrant people who quite voluntarily remove themselves from the gene pool. anything wrong with them tends to be negated by that. so now if they would just get their agenda out of politics and out of the schools then no rational person would have anything against them.
and if you had any understanding, at all, youd have figured out that if people want to equate "gay" with "waste of space", then they will, and getting all pissy about it is not going to change their minds. in fact, getting all pissy and whining about it is going to be counterproductive because it makes gay people look like a bunch of pissy whiny thin-skinned individuals, the kind of individuals who make mountains of molehills. really now what kind of idiot says he wants something and then takes actions that hinder that goal? trolling slashdot is much more "noble" by comparison.
How is that flamebait, you anonymous homophobic bastard?
When will people learn, that DRM is a an application of an illogical technology trying to solve a "Social Problem". Even if DRM could be "logically" be perfected, and it won't, it will never solve the root cause of the original problem. File sharing and copyright violations happen because the people who do it feel somehow that they are either justified in doing it or are just getting even with the crooks. Now, try to solve that problem using DRM? Sorry, try as they will its just not going to happen.
They could just photograph your toe and insert that in the JPEG header. What about photographing a 32 bit number and putting that in the JPEG header?
This method is already patented in the US and I believe in JP. I came across it a while ago when doing research for a patent the company I work for was intending to file. Apologies for the AC post, but our patent isn't filed yet haha, so best to remain anonymous.
"You set up the camera to capture an image of your eye through the viewfinder. Once captured, this biological reference is embedded as metadata into every photo you take."
Reading over the technical paper, the camera only needs it once, for up to 5 users. The image of the user(s) iris is then stored in non-volatile RAM. If a person steals and uses the camera, your iris (or whomever it was set for previously) will still be the imprint unless they goe back into the Iris capture mode and does the whole setup process over again. Then again, that's a standard for almost EVERY digital camera out there. Once a mode is set, it remains set until a user changes things. All incarnations of my Kodak and Canon digital camera keep resolution choice, last exposure setting, ISO, etc. until you specifically change it in the menu.
So in reality, five different people could get royally fucked.
So much for you morons RTFUCKINGA. Here, let me repost the important part of TFA so you don't have to waste your bandwidth trying to read the page, since you're apparently too lazy to do so anyways:
Canon's Iris Registration Patent
A recent Canon patent application (Pub. No.: US 2008/0025574 A1) reveals the next step in digital watermarking - Iris Registration.
The short and sweet of it?
1. Turn the Mode dial to "REG"
2. Choose between "REG 1 through "REG 5 (for up to 5 registered users)
3. Put eye to viewfinder
4. Look at display of center distance measurement point
5. Press the shutter button
6. Iris image captured
7. Go shoot
Additional embedded info can be added later. All metadata will be added to images after you're finished shooting in a collective manner and not for each image. The purpose of the collective tagging, if you will, is to refrain from hampering the camera's speed (frames per second) while shooting.
I don't think I need to embarrass either of you any further.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
nonce-sense: n. a sense that is used exactly one time.
While this may help in a copyright case, there's no way to copy proof Internet viewable images without adding artifacts the image itself. Once an image hits someone's screen they can simply use a screen capture program to re-save your image pixel for pixel without all the meta data. The only way to truly watermark an image is to add a visual watermark in an important area that is not likely to be cropped by thieves. The visual watermark will also exist in any duplication. If done properly the watermark should not be easily visible to the naked eye but that would still add some artifacts that may distort the perfection of the original image.
You want fun, go home and buy a monkey!
Canon claims this will help with copyright infringement of photos online.
At best this will just encourage another RIAA-like lawsuit mill. Ultimately, I don't really see the benefit.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
This could be useful in cell phones. Validate the owner before allowing financial transactions via phone.
But, of course, it would really be used to insure that only the registered owner could view DRM-protected content.
This is something that could really set copyright ahead in the right direction.
This is what copyright is all about. This one idea is at the essence of copyright.
Photographers protecting their images
You can't collect the iris registration of a corporate entity.
They're using their grammar skills there.
Although watermarking is not my field of expertise, I often attend the watermarking sessions at research conferences because I find them interesting. Current state-of-the art techniques are designed to embed watermarks such that they can survive a significant number of operations including image manipulations and re-compression. It comes down to the fact that the watermark stored is MUCH smaller than the amount of data that can be added to the image (without introducing visually objectionable artifacts). Because of this, the watermark data is redundantly stored and includes error-correction coding (I think the watermarking people call it something else though). A good watermark will be very hard to remove/destroy without making the source image worthless. From what I have seen, watermarks can often survive image retouching and format conversion but are venerable to image distortions (sheers, warps, stretch, etc).
Dear Sir or Madam,
Your post has been re-moderated and is currently scoring at +2, Interesting. We regret any inconvenience that this may have caused.
Sincerely,
The Anonymous Homophobic Bastard
So your photographer gets laser surgery and due to the differences in the outer part of the eye the signature is different and now they don't match their old photos? Yes, LASIK (for example) doesn't affect normal iris scans because those use IR to scan the iris itself. But this apparently takes a picture of the eye. And yes a picture can be affected by eye surgery.
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.
I'm gonna get one and register my arse instead of my iris. take that copyright infringers! I'll have to wash the viewfinder real good afterwards so I don't get pinkeye.
So Canon are publishing your biometric credentials with each photo you take. The same credentials that are supposed to be used for border controls, access control, drivers licenses, ...
Brilliant.
One of those things gave me like a bagillion dollars once and all I typed into it was
e d24, 7f, e d25, ff, w, q
Who knows what they can do to photos????
tm
Support TBI Research: http://www.raisinhope.org
.. or you'd end up taking a shot of the back of your teeth.
.. don't. :-)
No, no, don't try to visualise this at breakfast. Just
Insert
Having had a fairly expensive Canon DSLR stolen, it would seem that this could also be used as some sort of biometric device for allowing access to the camera. A user could set the camera to ask for a PIN code every time you start the camera for the professional photographer who needs uninterrupted shooting, or requiring the PIN every 500 shots or so for the average hobbyist who occasionally uses the camera. While, you may not get the camera back if it was actually stolen, it would at least prevent the thief from getting use out of your camera. It could also allow you display information about the camera owner when a PIN is entered incorrectly possibly allowing a good samaritan to return your precious DSLR to you.
I'd prefer a camera that would drop my name or whatever reference in the EXIM field so it's at least stored in the image. At the moment I find make, type, exposure and inside leg measurement makes it there, but not something you can control yourself.
:-).
While I'm at it, does anyone know a good and simple tool to create/edit/zap EXIM data in both interactive and batch mode (for Windows or Linux, I use both because I can't get rid of Outlook yet)? I know that invalidates the upper question a bit, I'm just looking at a way to store image data with the image in a way that it survives my own editing
Insert
Why should I sympathize with artists who are willing to be complicit in such draconian measures to protect an outmoded form of creative expression? Isn't the whole point that artists are supposed to be creative?
It isn't very creative to desperately cling to a form of expression (photography in this instance) that is so efficiently transmitted through digital networks that it no longer is worth doing (financially speaking).
A great artist would want to give her craft to the world and would find satisfaction in the act of creating, not try to snipe people who they imagine are stealing their "one good idea." The people who don't have very many good ideas are the ones most worried about others "taking" them.
Yay! Now at least it's a certain fact set in stone that Nikon will not implement that in less than 20 years anyway). I'm SO going to buy a D70...
Making laws based on opinions that stem up from false informations leads to witch hunts.
Oh, iris watermarking, sorry, my bad
Various synonyms:
happy
colourful
strange
unusual
bright
Yeah, because there's no such thing as a metadata-stripper for jpeg files, is there?
It can probably be done in about four lines of Perl code, including the #!/usr/bin/perl header.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
I'm thinking the way to do this is for each photographer to register a longish (64 bit) and unique key with a registration authority. This will be his ID. Then, take this key and, for each image, apply it holographically to the noise of the image, in some scale free and non-deterministic manner, such that, if the image is resampled, one can still reconstruct the key unambiguously. The math doesn't come to me immediately, but it would probably be more-or-less trivial to implement, considering the redundancy available with a 7 megapixel image or similar. I smell a patent.
Just callin' it like I see it.
biometrics is used against you. Some day soon it will be very Very difficult to prove that you really are yourself. Stop using biometric data to authenticate/identify people!! Use a signed message instead, for goodness sakes!!
A more useful use for this feature would be to have your camera refuse to operate for any but its identified owner(s). Make it of less value to thieves.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Did anybody else initially misread this as the DSRL?
The one thing I can imagine this really being usefull for is in solving the recurring argument in our household over who took that beautiful shot... Spidey!!!
But wait, I don't look through the eye piece when I take pictures any more...
Getting the metadata into the image, biometric or otherwise, is the easy part. What would help photographers much more is a way to search for that invisible watermark in order to find copyright infringement. Most of the high-end digital cameras (and copiers) these days already embed the serial number. Imagine typing that number into Google and finding all the places where that image appears. If Canon could patent that in addition to the watermarking procedure, they would make some real money.
How secure is this? This seems to be more of a matter of privacy and security than anything. I'm all for copyright infringement, but I really don't want to see the government be able to pick up a photo and be able to trace it back to me. Not only the government, but anyone with the know-how of reading/manipulating the meta-data code.
It's all fun and games until someone loses a digital iris.