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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?
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...
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.
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."
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.
BUT... this doesn't remove the original image, which a photog can take into court proving that it's his... now where's your 2-zillion x 1.5 zillion rez RAW image w/ the steganographic retina scan (and all the other related images showing similar scenery), to match the one he's using in court against you to prove original ownership? (which in turn pretty much tells you that it isn't even halfway useful until/unless somebody sues you for ripping off his work...)
OTOH, I don't think it has much practicality due to the simple fact that not all photographs (especially pro photos) are taken with someone's eyeball right up against the eyepiece. There's a reason that all the decent photo shops sell release cables and tripods, yanno? :)
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
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.
Fortunately, in (most of) this world, you are not paid according to what you "deserve," but according to what you can negotiate freely with the people who want your services or product.
Forcing your moral and ethical standards on others -- e.g. stating what other people do and do not "deserve" -- is something I find reprehensibly arrogant.
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.
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).
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?
I'm not a pro photographer, but I've been known to take upwards of 2500 images in a day, and without blowing my own horn too much I believe I've taken some photos that don't stink. I've even photographed weddings for friends and they've been ecstatic with the results (though I did not charge them).
...and then there's issues with the biometrics. What happens if you have eye trouble? How do you prove that's your iris scan embedded.
I think this idea is idiotic.
For starters, how hard is it to strip the image of this sort of thing? Hell any tool that will allow you to open the file will be able to save it to a new format sans any digital copy protection mechanism....unless you're willing to do even stupider things like legislate against tools that allow image format conversion, or lock the file in a proprietary format with proprietary tools that you have to buy from the camera manufacturer. No thanks.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
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.
HOWEVER, it is possible to use the minutae data to make a fake fingerprint that has all the right information to fool a fingerprint identification system. After all, the computer only cares about what information it stores - if all id systems work the same way (and for fingerprints the vast majority do, they just have different algorithms for comparing the minutae data) then one system's data is probably sufficient enough to fool another system. In other words, no, the information won't just be easily removed tags in the metadata. However, the information required by canon's system must, by definition, be stored in the image. Given enough samples of photographs with the same watermark, it should be possible to extract useful information. At the very least, it should be possible to falsify the ownership info onto another image and if iris systems work the same way fingerprint systems do, there may be enough information there to spoof another iris-based biometric id system. That's right, armchair experts, Canon isn't stupid enough to develop this entire application of watermarking without even knowing the first thing about it. Surprise! Well, your post drips with irony. It may be the case that canon has come up with a system to blunt the attacks I've proposed, but the text of this article does not provide much assurance beyond "trust us" style hand-waving.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.