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Google Researchers Made An Algorithm To Delete Watermarks From Photos (venturebeat.com)
"Researchers at Google have found a vulnerability in the way watermarks are used by stock imagery sites like Adobe Stock that makes it possible to remove the opaque stamp used to protect copyright," writes Khari Johnson via VentureBeat. "The consistent nature in which the watermarks are placed on photos can be exploited using an algorithm trained to recognize and automatically remove watermarks." From the report: Changing the position or opacity of a watermark do not impact the algorithm's ability to remove watermarks from images with copyright protection. Randomization, the researchers say, is required to keep images from being stolen. In results presented at the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition conference last month, subtle modifications to each watermark can make it harder to remove watermarks. With these warped watermarks, attempts to get rid of watermarks with an algorithm or photo editing software leaves noticeable marks, rendering an image useless. "As often done with vulnerabilities discovered in operating systems, applications or protocols, we want to disclose this vulnerability and propose solutions in order to help the photography and stock image communities adapt and better protect its copyrighted content and creations," research scientists Tali Dekel and Michael Rubenstein wrote in a blog post today. "From our experiments much of the world's stock imagery is currently susceptible to this circumvention." You can learn more about the different types of randomization that can be done to combat watermark removal and see more example images in Google's blog post. The full report and research is available via the project's GitHub page.
...in 3, 2, 1.
After all, DRM was circumvented and made public how to circumvent it. Or will Google be treated better than a normal Joe Random who happens to find a vulnerability in a commercial product?
Bovi et Iovi, like always.
Remove the entire image leaving the watermark
love is just extroverted narcissism
There are so many times the "Professional user" will break copyright.
Small companies without the money to pay for these big fees, to try to get a picture to make their presentation look a bit professional. Or used with a small audience, who really doesn't care. They will go as far as they think they can get away with it.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
So, decades gone by, and I've never heard anyone complain about watermarks being ineffective. Google uses enormous resources to crack watermarking, and here's betting they invent watermark 2.0 next week.
Here, pay me protection money, and I won't destroy your retail store.
By the way, serial numbers can be filed off of guns and car parts too. The watermarks were never meant to be perfect -- in fact, it was always easy for a graphic artist to manually remove them -- about ten minutes. But it made obvious that you were crossing the line in doing so.
If Google wants to do something really useful as regards images, they can make a way for me to block or otherwise remove images with watermark from search results. These watermark images are a growing plague that pollutes image searching.
Everything in the Universe sucks: It's the law!
I suppose adding a watermark containing or based on the hash of the original image would suffice to randomise it. How this is applied is open to any number of ways, such as adding a QR code, or a 2D barcode, or warping the watermark according to an algorithm based on the hash. That should be random enough to mess with the removal algorithm.
By removing the water mark you are effectively infringing the copyright
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
If the "watermark" is removeable, then it is too weak.
Don't use techniques that watermark by overlaying shadows/highlights. That makes it possible to calculate the original pixel by subtracting out the watermark. Instead, just type "stock photo" or "copyright:me" across the image in a fat opaque font. Be sure to obliterate some fine detail - such as a face. It is now impossible to recreate the original.
Lots of work in photoshop may still get rid of the text, but detail will be lost and the result won't be the original. If someone needs several days in photoshop, then reshooting may be cheaper anyway. and certainly more fun. Or just pay the copyright holder for a non-watermarked copy.
I would love to have this technology for video. Anything to turn off those annoying network bugs while watching TV would be nice. Even if this can't be done in real time right now, having it in MythTV to clean up recordings would be really nice.
At least they don't put the stupid bugs on the video on DVDs. (How long until they try that?)
These are public domain digital facsimiles. They are only copyrightable when you add something "unique" to them
If the photographer didn't add anything unique, who would use this over the free public domain version? If you had more interesting lighting or camera angles, then it would be easy to prove the burden of copyright when your photo was chosen over a free alternative - and going to the effort of removing the watermark.
It's not even nearly that simple. Even a semi-transparent white overlay with no shading of extremely difficult to remove if it passes over fine detail. The watermark effectively reduces the dynamic range of that part of the image - that has to be digitally reconstructed using the rest of the photo as context. I'm sure that's what they're doing and it's a pretty tough problem, especially if you don't have to provide the software work a mask off exactly which pixels contain the watermark.
to filter out Pintrest image search spam?
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
The 'unique' thing they add is not the copyright notice. It is cleaning up the image (adjust contrast, etc). That is copyrightable, because it is a creative work.
Watermark software will just have to become more involved to get around this, such as randomizing/distorting size and density of watermarks. Watermarks will become like Captcha's.
Table-ized A.I.
Welcome to the mid 90s, Google.
I remember using plugins for VirtualDub that did the same thing with video.
All you need to do is recreate a decent representation of the watermark, and the plugin simply subtracts it from the video.
Bonus points if you dynamically handle opacity so you can handle fade in and fade out.
This was done to remove semi-transparent station logos from the bottom right of TV broadcast recordings.
As an artist, this really bothers me.
As a software engineer, I've long known that watermarks can be removed by the diligent or the intentionally malicious. However, now that Google is doing it, those who infringe my works can now claim that the infringement is not intentional - which substantially reduces the penalties for copyright infringement, and increases the incentive to violate copyright.
Google, it seems, has not considered the ethical implications of many of its recent decisions. Without the arts - movies, music, images, etc... - who, but geeks, would use a search engine?
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Does it become less copyrightable, when the entire process is done by an automated script on a computer?
My suggestion is, anything that CAN be done with automation without any human interaction (or minimal) is by definition, non-creative. And if it was creative, the computer/program (Photoshop??) owns whatever copyright, not the human that pushed the button.
Most clean up being done these days is simply auto adjustments made with computer programs.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
They rely on the watermark being constant, and apparently it usually is, average large number of photos and you can extract the watermark and just subtract it from all of them. Yeah, some dynamic range is lost, but evidently for most photos its not noticeable.
Another method that I've... err.. come across:
Since stock photographers try to maximize their exposure (pun not intended, but noted), the put up their images on a bunch of stock photo sites, each site has its own watermark, usually in a different location, so if you google image search the watermarked image, you can fill in the watermarked areas from those other images.
Right - the averaging gives them a mask. That's one part. The second, they actually do reconstruct the dynamic range to a close approximation. There is some ambiguity involved as well. Once you overlay white on light colors, you can't tell how white it was underneath because you end up clipping past the value bounds.
My main point is to refute the AC above me that you can't use Photoshop to remove these, even as a pro. This requires some serious computation.
My suggestion is, anything that CAN be done with automation without any human interaction (or minimal) is by definition, non-creative.
So since you can procedurally generate paintings of landscapes, no real paintings of landscapes can now be copyrighted?
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