I've been pretty busy of late with digital watermarking projects. The new release of DFI 4.0 (Digimarc for Images, with the Chroma upgrade) is going really well and I'll post a video comparing the Classic watermarking to the new Chroma upgrade in the near future. Be sure to upgrade your plug-ins if you haven't already, there's even one for Elements users.

Our Mobile technology is keeping me on my toes. It generated a lot of interest at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and with so many inquires that it just may have to spring forth fully grown like Athena from Zeus' forehead. OK, the Athenian reference might have been a bit of a stretch, but our work in the mobile realm really is a gee-whiz experience that seems like magic at times. Hopefully you'll experience it in the near future.

Although I've been preoccupied pushing pixels within images, I have been reading some pretty interesting articles.  There is this piece in the NYTimes that Tina Brown of the Daily Beast recommended. Jason Epstein's article on writing and publishing in our digital age and it got me thinking about copyrights and rewarding the corporation, artist or craftsperson who generates content.  I image that for many of you this is a major reason for you to be watermarking images.

I get so focused on images that I sometimes forget that written content has the same issues for publishers. It is the ease of copying digital content, images, words, video, etc that can be intoxicating. It "feels" as though it must be OK to borrow, take, edit, reuse or just plain plagiarize these "free" things placed before us on the Internet. I could try to be the evangelizing non-smoker berating those who still smoke, but since I still smoke on occasion, metaphorically speaking...  So if like me you noticed that you started tipping a lot better after working in the service industry, think of this as a similar situation.  While it's easy to generate content, it's hard to "create" content, especially content that is original and unique, which takes real effort, but the ease of borrowing in our digital age makes that easy to forget.

So take a few minutes and let Jason Epstein's love of the written word remind you of moments when some creative content touched you.  Let's hope we can figure out fair methods to pay those who create such content.  I'm not sure if I'm ready to paying for the next viral video of someone caught on a camera phone doing something stupid, but I can say that for a good story, photo or video, I've been using my credit card.