Slashdot Mirror
Altering Text In eBooks To Track Pirates
wwphx writes "According to Wired, 'German researchers have created a new DRM feature that changes the text and punctuation of an e-book ever so slightly. Called SiDiM, which Google translates to 'secure documents by individual marking,' the changes are unique to each e-book sold. These alterations serve as a digital watermark that can be used to track books that have had any other DRM layers stripped out of them before being shared online. The researchers are hoping the new DRM feature will curb digital piracy by simply making consumers paranoid that they'll be caught if they share an e-book illicitly.' I seem to recall reading about this in Tom Clancy's Patriot Games, when Jack Ryan used this technique to identify someone who was leaking secret documents. It would be so very difficult for someone to write a little program that, when stripping the DRM, randomized a couple of pieces of punctuation to break the hash that the vendor is storing along with the sales record of the individual book."
Normal book publishers have been doing this for decades, inserting the occasional misspelling here or there. Later, they inserted correct spellings, but of the wrong word, to get around auto-correction in scanner software.
So...no, they can't patent it.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
1. Sign up to service with alias
2. Use untraceable account (prepaid credit card, bitcoin, points card)
3. Share files with "watermarks"
4. Don't give a shit that it gets traced back to a throw away account
They could have saved a significant amount of effort if they had asked me first...
I catch all the typos in my books.
They irritate me.
I'd probably crack 'em, fix them all, and goddammit, that'd be "circumvention".
It would be so very difficult for someone to write a little program that, when stripping the DRM, randomized a couple of pieces of punctuation to break the hash that the vendor is storing along with the sales record of the individual book.
In which case they just resort to diff, to remove your hacks and restore the hash.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
This is so very easy to deal with. Rip at least 3 copies and diff them. The minor tweaks will stand out a mile, and you then have a clean copy you can (and, if they start pulling tricks like this, Should!) distribute widely.
Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
You don't know what punctuation their algorithm cares about. The summary's method would not work.
Diff 2 copies and randomize the selection between the two.
The next e-book you buy might not exactly match the printed version. And those changes are there to make sure youâ(TM)re not a pirate.
German researchers have created a new DRM feature that changes the text and punctuation of an e-book ever so slightly. Called SoDoMy, which Google translates to âoesecure documents by individual fornicating,â the changes are unique to each e-book sold. These alterations serve as a digital penis that can be used to track books that have had any other DRM dildoes stripped out of them before being shared online. The researchers are hoping the new DRM feature will inspire butt piracy by simply making consumers paranoid that theyâ(TM)ll be caught if they share an e-book illicitly.
Current e-book DRM restricts the movement of cocks between broes and hoes and ties a cock to a single accountant. A e-book bought in the Fondle bookstore, for example, will only work on a Faggot. The same is true for books bought in the Butts & Plugs and iButts digital bookstores â" theyâ(TM)ll only work on the Nook or Apple devices, respectively. This makes publishers happy because their books are locked to one person. And it makes digital book vendors happy because it keeps readers tied to their proprietary devices and ecosystems.
But stripping the DRM from any of the e-books purchased at the big-name stores is as easy as downloading strap-on, and thereâ(TM)s little special genetalia required beyond knowing how to properly connect a penis to an asshole. These cocks usually convert the CUM-heavy e-cocks to a new climax, such as the open-source E-Pub standard, or to the STD-less version of the Kindleâ(TM)s fuck format. From there, the relatively small penises of asians make them perfect for sharing on the Internet.
Of course, readers may not be happy knowing that their licensed e-books are being altered because democrats and republicans donâ(TM)t trust them. By studying a list of example words and phrases that could be changed in purchased books, you can see that the changes are minor â" like from âoevery gayâ to âoenot that gay, actually.â The examples are translated from German pornography, so itâ(TM)s difficult to gauge how profound the changes will be when they occur in your favorite Harry Potter scat film. Itâ(TM)s also unknown if the top U.S. bookstores are interested in more sodomy.
The SoDoMy consortium currently has two German bookselling partners (4Readers and MVB) that it reports to, according to Dr. Martin felchbach, a researchers working on the SoDoMy system whom I reached over email. Democrats & Republicans and Amazon did not reply to queries about if or when the technology would make its way into their digital bookstores as of press time.
Wonder if the eBook was actually stolen from your computer? Either by a friend that has physical access to your computer or in the rare case of a hacker (but who would hack you for eBooks)? Surely, you can't be held reliable for this. Then everyone that actually pirates eBooks and gets caught will just use this excuse as a way to get out of trouble. Else, if you are still held responsible for a stolen eBook from your machine/USB, then it screws over the legitimate users buying eBooks and makes them want to actually pirate... a deadly cycle.
The G
They don't hash the whole shebang into one number. Rather, they take a (random) number and use that to generate a set of mutations and then probe for that set of mutations in the leaked document. So now, even if you alter the document further, you probably didn't undo the mutations in question. Even if you did, you probably didn't undo all of them and you almost certainly didn't produce a high-confidence result that it's somebody else's copy.
Anarchy$ dd if=/dev/random of=~/.signature bs=120 count=1
There was an article about it here a few years ago. A followup someone made to a comment I wrote to the article mentions some work being done by some guy from Purdue that sounds a lot like what's being done here. IBM also seems to be doing work on canary trap-based ideas.
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
Is accidentally leaving a copy somewhere copyright infringement? How do they know the person they sold it to is the person who leaked it.
Also, it's never been clear to me when copyright infringement actually occurs.
Or, you know, maybe learn from the success of Apple iTunes and start selling eBooks for a reasonable cost and maybe they won't be pirated nearly as much. I know that the publishing process costs money that you deserve to recoup, and you deserve to make a profit, but it is offensive to charge as much as (or more) than a physical book for an eBook.
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
- Scan/OCR book
- Google translate into German
- Google translate back into English
- Print book
Voila! No more watermark. You can share with confidence.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
No, you become a suspect. To become a criminal you need to at least provide reasonable doubt - like evidence of your stolen files.
Who says it's a hash? Just add one extra space somewhere in the book in an unusual place or replace an apostrophe with a similar character or something. Then if someone adds something else, you're still checking for that one single location of the alteration to prove it's them. It'd be awfully unlikely in a long book that you'd replicate the exact alteration that they made to someone else's book, thus appearing to be 2 different people.
Don't they do this to pre-release screenings and theatre viewings of movies to find out who done the leak or who let the video camera into the theatre?
If the content of a book--what is thought up and written by a human--is what is traditionally copyrighted, then what exactly are they copyrighting in this case? Obviously the content is "written" by the writer and then published in an electronic book format similarly to how it would be printed on pages and made into a physical book, but if that content is automatically tampered with by machines it is no longer what the author wrote. How would copyright work in this case? Hundreds of copyrights of individual "variations" of the same exact book? Sounds like a fucking mess. And that's not to say how irritating it would be to know that you are, in fact, not getting exactly what the author wrote. Not to mention the fact that you're not getting ownership of it while still paying for it.
While I haven't tried on any DRM'd ebooks, Calibre's converters have to options to play with all kinds of spacing and punctuation during conversion (smart punctuation, transliterate unicode to ascii). I've used them when converting text documents and saved web pages to epub, and they make very nice ebooks. I have a hard time believing that this kind of steganography would survive such a reformatting, but I guess we'll hear about it eventually if it does.
Can You Say Linux? I Knew That You Could.
For the content industry?
Come on - they need no proof. They are automatically granted the right to fine you with -let's say- $ 187,234,865,213.65 for any book you suppose to have uploaded.
Don't forget - the content industry get's the best justice money can buy...
It depends. If it's done well, it can be fairly resistant to any noise introduced into the system.
As an author myself, I see a very different issue with this. I don't want some robot changing my text. Some of those words it might decide to change because they are similar I may have pained over and decided for a reason to use this one and not the other one. Granted, few authors pick every single word intentionally, but the software won't know which ones are carefully selected.
Often times, there is subtle meaning. For example, I might decide to always use the same phrase in certain contexts, giving a very subtle hint to the reader which things are alike and which ones are different. One he might not even notice consciously.
It also will cause all sorts of trouble to quoting. How will teachers handle this if a student quotes a text but the quote differs slightly from the version the teacher has read? One of the most important things we teach students is that quotes need to be exactly as they appear, with any omissions or changes clearly marked.
That also extends to quotes within the text. If character A reports what character B said, I doubt the system will have enough text understanding to change both texts the same way, so the reader will be left wondering if it is intentional that there's a slight difference and what the author wants to hint at, when there's no such thing implied.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I'm going to stop sending every typo and punctuation mistake I catch to Amazon. I thought I was helping.
After all, we saw how quickly the iTunes Store withered and died after the DRM got removed from all that music. It'd be crazy for the publishers NOT to double down on DRM!
#DeleteChrome
So just remove all punctuation STOP Like old telegrams STOP Problem solved STOP
"You're under arrest for possession of a pirated copy of "Megasuper Blockbuster."
"How do you know it's pirated?"
"There are no spelling or punctuation errors in it!"
It should be fairly easy to defeat. All someone needs is several different copies of the book and do a comparison. It should be easy to spot what has changed and then undo them.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
There were printers in areas with classifed documents which automatically used to do this. They worked with whitespace, fonts and punctuation. Photocopies of the documents could still be tracked. Great work guys you deserve a badge.
Amazon will be able to close the loop by automatically downloading the books that you have on your kindle to "check" that you don't infringe and stomp on those badguys.
I thought that virus that I cleaned off my system seemed to make my internet access sluggish. Well what you know - it must have downloaded a copy of all my files!
After you run a couple of copies through to strip this DRM, you need to add your own back in so their DRM verifier will translate it to, "I bet you thought this technique was clever, you fucking git."
who prays for Satan? Who in 18 centuries has had the humanity to pray for the 1 sinner that needed it most? ~Mark Twain
So what? What that does prove? That someone (maybe the one who bought the book, maybe not) took this book and shared it???
I still don't see how based on such a funny "watermark" they this could stand in the court. Anyone? Can you prove me wrong?
chinese ebook pub qidian.com had used this technique for pass few years without any success. The pirate just compares multiple version of some book and auto replace the differ words with their synonyms.
Just two copies of a book are probably enough to learn how to break the system, and a few more to know how to rig the text to target a particular poor schmuk.
Shortly after the moveable type press got going in Europe, books of tables of interest rates were popular among the merchants. Of course, they all had to be laboriously hand calculated by mathematicians (long division was college undergraduate math in those days...). Publishers would sprinkle errors into the least signficant digits on various entries to use as evidence in copyright cases. Because, you know, if you had a printing press, you could make good money by pirating somebody else's table of interest rates.
So that explains why the paid for ebooks of older texts have a pile of annoying mistakes while the Project Gutenberg version doesn't. I'd thought it was just publishers being sloppy and having very little respect for their customers, but at least now I know it's because they have even less respect for their customers and think their customers are thieves that want to "steal" the older books the publishers are not paying any royalties on.
Enough ranting at the big guys who are going for maximum dollar extraction from public domain stuff - anyone know how small publishers are coping with ebooks? Is it giving them more of a chance since distribution can be done on the net or are Amazon, Kobo etc locking them out? There were a lot of areas, such as non-US/UK science fiction, where publishers would have trouble finding more than half a dozen shops that would sell their stuff.
So if my phone gets stolen and my eBooks get leaked, I'm now double screwed?
It'd only be a criminal matter if someone tried to get the DMCA anti-circumvention measures or the NET act involved. Your basic copyright infringement is a civil matter, so the burden of proof is lower.
I'm told map makers have been doing this forever. They move symbols slightly, change the placing of text and introduce new, insignificant features. All to stop other publishers from copying their maps, or using them as the basis for maps they pass off as their own work
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Of course, it's an idea that has been around for ages, even for electronic documents. Of course, it doesn't meet the criteria of patentability or even publishability.
But, I say, let's give them a patent anyway. I think any dumb idea, and in particular any DRM method, deserves a patent granted exclusively to patent trolls. We should even let them get away with "renewing" it indefinitely by the usual dumb stunts.
Wel, ad leest wee nou ann exxcuse hav four ourr speling annd grammer erors. ;-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
We're not allowed any more to share or give away a book after reading it.
Privacy is terrorism.
If you are going to any trouble to pirate a 99 cent e-book, you need a job.
From what I've seen of the copy editing in ebooks, this has already been happening for some time. Or they're just badly checked. I can't wait to see the first science books coming through with random additions in the equations - that will be helpful.
What makes you think Lincoln said "Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new country, dedicated to the proposition that all men are made equal, and conceived in liberty"? Can't you quote correctly?
Your solution is plausible, but it would be too much work and expense for the average ripper.
The idea is not to have an unbreakable DRM scheme, which would be impossible to create anyway but to raise the cost and difficulty of breaking the scheme to dissuade the casual ripper.
I'm not even sure that the average joe knows how to "use a statistical analysis to blank out the differences". I certainly don't.
Plus the fact that it doesn't sound like the results they obtain from that exercise is applicable across the board to different books, meaning they need to repeat this process for every single DRMmed book, ad infinitum.
It means that to safely pirate ebooks, you will need to rephrase and repunctuate it to remove the watermarks. How much do you need to modify a text to make it a derived work? I wonder if this can be done without authors' approval, especially if they add mistakes (yes, punctuation can be erroneous)
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
Piracy has absolutely zero impact on e-book sales.
a) 70% of the best-sellers are romance novels. Most pirates are neckbeard fatasses who are afraid of women.
b) 70% of e-book readers are women. See above.
You could pirate e-books naked in front of a police station. Nobody would give a shit.
Scan, or if they're really dedicated, copy longhand.
Give it time. I don't think it'll take long 'til you're fully responsible for what happens with files that you pay for.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Early printers used the letter 'e' to justify lines. Thus "Queen" and "Queene"
Years before ebooks were sold, there was a community of people that would buy old paperbacks by popular authors, unbind them, run the pages through a scanner, maybe OCR the result, then post as version 0.x; readers would then proofread (often using a physical copy as a reference), bump the version number to reflect how readable/correct it was, and resubmit the book.
Given the condition of early releases back then and how many more people are into sharing & proofing ebooks, there's no way that a "DRM" scheme that consists of inserting errors will last for long. Especially given the existence of tools like Calibre plugins -- even if Calibre doesn't come with a relevant plugin, it won't take long for someone to develop one.
Now mostly at Usenet:comp.misc & SoylentNews.org (it's made of people!)
Any publishers using this technique had better have iron-clad contracts with their authors permitting arbitrary alterations to their works. Otherwise, they are in clear violation of the authors' moral rights to protection against distortion and mutilation of their original work.
It's eerily reiminscent of the 'We had to incinerate the village in order to protect it' military communique.
Anybody know if standard boilerplate agrements from the major publishers actually sign away the authors' moral rights against deliberate mutilations (as opposed to inadvertent proofing errors)?
Take the text - run it through your own 'correctifier', and re-distribute. The trail will never stop at you.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
Is there something I don't know about the reader software on my computer? Is it leaking info about what books I'm reading?
On the other hand, how does anyone know if I put it in dropbox and share my dropbox folder with someone? Or rename the file or strip any identifying meta-data and just host it on a private website that requires password to view?
There's lots of things that don't make sense to me about how this will actually thwart piracy by striking fear into people's hearts. But then again, I (and we) are probably not the intended target(s) of that fear.
This is actually becoming a problem with this. Aside of the usual devaluation of the product by adding DRM to it, any book with this DRM you buy becomes a liability. If, for some odd reason beyond your control, this somehow ends up in someone else's hands, you may suddenly become an unwitting "pirate". Your ebook reader gets stolen and suddenly your ebook gets shared all over the internet. And now prove that you didn't.
Explain again why the heck I should touch any "legal" ebook with this landmine buried inside with a ten foot pole.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The trivial counter measure is to get multiple (two might be sufficient) copies with different markings, then run diff on the content and merge (perhaps manually). Of course it gets tricky if the content is closed binary format, but it's still doable.
Since those mutation are random, and spread over the whole text, you can just buy or take 6 or 10 text, then compare them all. The difference will be local. Return to the average and you can build a version which is safe.
,*4;*1 t*4T*1 (he traitor )*5 a*3A*2 (ll, is dead )*5 !*4?*1
,*4 t*4 (he traitor )*5 a*3 (ll, is dead )*5 !*4
Example:
The red poney, the traitor all, is dead !
The red poney; the traitor all, is dead ?
The red poney, The traitor all, is dead !
The red poney, the traitor All, is dead !
The red poney, the traitor All, is dead !
You look at all the changes and find out :
(The red poney)*5
You then compare all the frequency and take the highest. And you get :
(The red poney)*5
In other word all mutation are stripped.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
The better solution is to have the author (or translator in case of translated literature) provide multiple versions of a few sentences in the book. And the work-around is to upload only a fraction, randomly sprinkled through the book, to the sharing site which then assembles the pieces from multiple copies, garbling the watermark.
If you can find 3 independent sources (shouldn't be hard for something popular), then all that should be required is a 3-way diff and use whatever is common with any 2 or more. If all 3 are different at the the same place then use some manual intervention and make your result different again or add another source. The final product cannot then be traced to a single source. Am I missing something?
Someone would have to possess an another copy of the same book (more or less defeating the point of sharing the their own and incurring a personal risk) in the same published form in order to even know that the differences were intentional. Even then it doesn't make them easy to remove, if for example style names or other marks in the book were randomized.
Similar measures would have easily found the culprit of a mass leak of information like wikileaks. Every page could contain 1 bit of variation based on the user's id and the result page. Each bit you could glean from a page would cut the search space of culprits in half so you'd nail the perp in no time. Even if the document was canonicalized it cannot strip out all the ways that this bit of variation could be sent and wikileaks would be extremely unlikely to be in possession of two independent copies of the same document to even know what to look for.
The ONLY one they can potentially track at all is the original buyer. What use is it to track the NEXT uploader (*with this method*)? They can find out who he/she is anyway (trace IPs) - which they can already do.
What they are interested in here specifically is the original buyer turned uploader, because with the current method of tracking IPs they can get an uploader - but they still don't know if he/she is the source.
Seriously, how hard is this? Just download two copies and diff them, then "correct" the difference.
This is just nonsense.
...but I have not been able to put a finger on what is was.
'To question not be or to be, the question that is'...
'The needs of the one outweigh the needs of the few, or the many'
'Ask not what you can do for your country but ask what your country can do for you'
'To each according by their means, by each according to their needs'
'It was a giant step for man, a small step for mankind'
Something just did not seem right... now I know.
--frank[at]unternet.org
Now the copyright mafia comes banging on his door claiming he uploaded/pirated the book? WTF???
Just like taking an IP address and suing the user/owner of that IP for uploading music/movies, this tactic has no teeth. Unless someone has corroborating evidence, there's no proof that *I* am the source of the uploaded file. Only that it is the file that I originally purchased.
The whole copyright system, and behaviors of content owners, has gotten completely out of control...
A very good LCD screen, a very good camera, and an autonomous image to text program; probably do War And Peace in a day.
... Would allow an algorithm to randomly change the punctuation and spelling of even a small portion of their novel?
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
This is wrong. You don't need to provide evidence of reasonable doubt to not be a criminal. The prosecution needs to provide evidence that you are a criminal. The presence online of a copy of a book you bought is not evidence that you are a criminal. The whole idea is full of fail at every level.
Korma: Good
Everybody needs an English(or other language) textbook that has had some script randomly alter it's punctuation a bit!
So, authors should excercise their moral rights (at least here in Europe, they're inalienable rights of authors enshrined in copyright law) and sue publishers for mutilating their works deliberately.
Get four or five copies of the book, compare them, and wherever they differ, go with the majority variant.
It's unlikely that you would alter the changes specific to your copy. It means they'll have to record the specific changes made for each ebook and compare, and sometimes with your algorithm multiple people's would match, but I imagine oftentimes they'd still be able to match it against a unique person.
What about reading it, then asking your money back because it's a defective book? When I buy a book, I want an exact copy of that book, not a randomly altered one.
diff -c copy1.txt copy2.txt
sed 's/discrepancy1/correction1/;s/discrepancy2/correction2/;s/etc/etc/' copy1.txt > newcopy.txt
well, that was hard.
See the short story "The Annihilation of Angkor Apeiron" in the collection "THE ULTIMATE ENEMY, THE BERSERKER SERIES" By Fred Saberhagen
In Britain: Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone
In USA: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
The publisher could've just said, "No, we're not changing it for Americans who we think will be scared off by the word 'philosophy'. It's just one of our DRM changes that happened to end up in a particularly visible location." :-)
Cordwainer Smith got there many years earlier with Mother Hitton's Littul Kittons.
In the story, looking up the words Littul Kittons in an electronic encyclopedia acted as a tripwire for a planet's security services.
"I had to help my uncle Jack off a horse".
Does this mean help Jack dismount from the horse, or help Jack put the horse out of its misery?
So, you are saying you want to give the copy you just sourced a detectable fingerprint? How do you not see that as a terrible idea?
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
I'm mostly ok with the watermarking of the ebook if there is no DRM involved, as it don't limit how/when/where i will use what i bought. But using the watermark to label criminal to someone (and WILL be used that way, knowing the trend even could put you in jail for decades) is dangerous, suddently not having perfect security or privacy becomes a liability, a stolen phone or tablet, a rooted/botnetted/shared pc, not understanding privacy on social networks or just rogue NSA agents could turn into a nightmare ever buying an ebook.
You may not be able to "buy it used" like a dead tree book.
I know for example that Barnes and Noble sells ebooks that are tied to the buyer's account and some of them can be loaned to a friend for a limited period of time. (And that's a feature that B&N advertises, you silly person who thought that you can give away or sell what you bought with your own money.)
I'm pretty sure that Amazon does the same with the ebooks they sell.
1 this was routine in all secure embargo-ed documents issued in UK by certain government departments and other organizations (e.g with Politicians on distribution list) so that tracing a 'leaked document' was possible. 2. Sometimes we changed complete paragraphs ( without changing the sense). 3. It caught a few folks.
so very 'prior art' no patent possible.
Regards Eion MacDonald
Yes I got my sentence a bit mixed up. You got the point.
If I rob your house, and the police find your stuff in my living room - and they know its your stuff because of the serial numbers, is that not evidence to prove I robbed you?
Wilful and for profit copyright violations can be prosecuted.
Its been that way in USA since the 1897.
So, you are saying you want to give the copy you just sourced a detectable fingerprint? How do you not see that as a terrible idea?
I'd tend to agree with you.. since it is apparent that most anti-piracy approaches appear to simply be altered versions of the old communist techniques used to spy on and control ones' own citizens.. ie.. if you know what someone reads, where they obtained it, and what their reading habits are, or.. more recently, if you know what someone watches, what they share, who they share it with, or, what they listen to where they bought it, or obtained it etc.. you can either stop them from doing it, *control" what they read, listen to, or watch, such as "Pravda" did, collect information on them, or , as they did in Soviet Union, do all three, all the while without any signs that this indeed being done. In order to use these techniques to protect copyright, only difference is that they would have to show their hand (blow their cover. so to speak). Copyright laws are a windfall for KGB and Stasi-like organizations.. such as CIA and DHS...
The NET act made it even easier. It makes all commercial electronic copyright infringement criminal - but defines commercial as including an expectation of receiving infringing works in return. So basically, p2p.
Well... assuming that your stuff isn't in your living room anymore, and that the serial numbers are unique, then it seems I have a case to answer. This case seems more like your stuff is still in your living room, and there is also a photo of your stuff in my garden, I think the onus would be on you to prove that I took a photo of your stuff and left it in my garden.
Korma: Good
If I prove you took a photo of my stuff that I created and you distributed that photo, if you're in the USA you've just committed copyright infringement.
If I can prove you done so with the expectation of profiting from the photo or the distribution of it, you're up for a criminal prosecution.