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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
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...
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
pfff. oh yeah. right. with some "magical hex editor" or something. keep dreaming.
THL phish sticks
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
like maybe the print screen button
Suppose you produced an image by doing conversions from one format to another, starting with some photographer's original image. Does the photographer hold the copyright for this derivative image? The photographer might have some image which looks pretty much the same, with a watermark of his iris in it. But does he have the original of the image being complained about? The photographer doesn't have the generated image, because you produced that image yourself.
How different does one image have to be from another image before copyright on one image doesn't apply to the other one? Do the images have to look different to the eye, or do they just have to look different to a computer program like "diff"? What if you do a bit of cropping and run a few filters over the photographer's image. Does the photographer have copyright over the image you make? If you remove the watermark from an image, is that enough to make it a different image according to copyright law?
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).
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
Not to mention the obvious:
Enable Camera Password?[YES][NO]
Encrypt the iris store in the camera... problem solved... next?
This is the NSA, we're gonna geet U h@x0r5! Also, what is a h@x0r5?
Sure, and if you convert a CD to MP3 files, then it's totally OK to distribute free copies of said files.
And then there's that James Bond movie scene
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
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.
"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.
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.