Content theft, copyright infringement, and plagiarism happens everyday, whether it is intentional or not. Most people don’t realize the ease of infringement, but it surely IS very easy in this digital age. With images, it’s even easier nowadays. A simple Google image search can turn up any of your works for use by anybody. Many may not care, especially if the work is being used for good purposes, such as education or non-profit. But if your hard work was being used to generate revenue, then I think most people would care. By protecting your images with a digital watermark, your work can be identified as yours at anytime; maybe it is not for revenue generation, but it could easily be used for name recognition.

It’s easy to get information from a digitally watermarked image. The Digimarc Reader for Images is a free browser plugin that will identify images containing a digital watermark. You can download it at: www.digimarc.com/mypicturemarc/download/default.asp