Canon Files For DSLR Iris Registration Patent 273
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."
uh (Score:5, Insightful)
... whatcouldpossiblygowrong (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Is it really watermarking if it's in the metadata? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:uh (Score:5, Insightful)
Use and Abuse (Score:2, Insightful)
"Ooo, hey I just extracted ur iris pic and watermarked my baby pics with it. Now you're busted for kiddie porn. LoLz."
What a terrible idea (Score:1, Insightful)
Someone would just navigate to your flickr page, do a quick google search to find your real name (or read it from your page), look you up in publicly accessible databases to acquire your address etc, and then just rip your biometric information right out of the images you post! As wikipedia points out [wikipedia.org] there are commercially available fake iris contact lenses designed to defeat these scanners - previously, the problem was only in acquiring someone's iris. Not to mention that in the future as biometrics become more popular we're likely to see people's irises, fingerprints, and other information used in household readers for providing authentication to software and internet applications - much like the fingerprint scanners we're seeing on more and more laptops.
Publically distributing your iris is a bad idea now, but a terrible idea in the future.
Re:uh (Score:3, Insightful)
I think it's a waste of effort, but then anyone who wants credit to them this will be a feature.
Re:metadata (Score:3, Insightful)
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? :)
typicalslashdotkneejerkreaction (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:uh...turn it off? (Score:3, Insightful)
Forcing your moral and ethical standards on others -- e.g. stating what other people do and do not "deserve" -- is something I find reprehensibly arrogant.
Who puts the eye on the viewfinder? (Score:2, Insightful)
Waah. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:uh (Score:4, Insightful)
As a result of the foregoing, biological information indicative of a photographer need not be acquired every time an image is taken and, hence, processing executed by the imaging apparatus is not subjected to a load in terms of the sequence of photography.
1. Engage brain, 2. Respond (Score:1, Insightful)
I assume it's not embedding raw biometric data, but rather a cryptographic hash of your cryptographic data and the image data. You know, like a PGP signature.
Of course, since it took me about 0.3 seconds to come up with this, I'm sure it's beyond the capabilities of Canon's entire R&D division, huh?
Re:uh...turn it off? (Score:3, Insightful)
I think this idea is idiotic.
For starters, how hard is it to strip the image of this sort of thing? Hell any tool that will allow you to open the file will be able to save it to a new format sans any digital copy protection mechanism....unless you're willing to do even stupider things like legislate against tools that allow image format conversion, or lock the file in a proprietary format with proprietary tools that you have to buy from the camera manufacturer. No thanks.
it's all economics (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:uh (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Sweet (Score:3, Insightful)
HOWEVER, it is possible to use the minutae data to make a fake fingerprint that has all the right information to fool a fingerprint identification system. After all, the computer only cares about what information it stores - if all id systems work the same way (and for fingerprints the vast majority do, they just have different algorithms for comparing the minutae data) then one system's data is probably sufficient enough to fool another system.
Re:uh (Score:3, Insightful)
Is there some massive and unlikely database of people's irises that I'm not aware of?
Re:uh (Score:5, Insightful)
Explain to me how this is any different? One day it's an "option" in the high-end DSLR firmware. Next year it's turned on by default in the midrange. Couple years down the road, it'll be standard. Year after that, it'll be illegal not to ship a camera with the iris-based tracking system.
There is no real reason to think this is true. This is exactly what I'm talking about. Many people here are so paranoid that they think everyone is out to get them. If watermarks on printers were announced as a feature before they were ever put into production, do you think it would have been as successful? And how can this be forced onto people anyway? There is no way for the camera to tell if the photo of your iris is really yours or not to begin with. Don't you think there might be a reason for that? If Canon really wanted to track you, don't you think a more simple UID watermark generated on the camera would be the best way to do it?
But hey, mod me down, because by the rating you seem to be getting, there must be quite a few others wearing their tin-foil hats today.
I have great concern about privacy and the use of technology in general. I used to be an EFF member in sunnier days of higher income, but what I really can't stand are "advocates" who overreact to these types of things without even considering if it's really a problem.
Re:uh (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah. Why would anyone pay you? It's obviously trivial to spoof. Go ahead and get yourself locked up for 1) forgery 2) extortion 3) making kiddie porn -- good for 20 to life, I guess.
People seem to have got the idea this is meant to prove conclusively who took a photo. It's not, and can't. It's like a serial number, it can be faked or removed. The main idea is to stop careless abuse -- no one could say "Sorry, I had no idea it was your photo" if it's got your metadata in it. And if they have a version with the metadata removed, they have a lot more explaining to do.
Re:uh (Score:4, Insightful)