Champaign Sex And The Perils of Copy Protection
First, the yummy illustration:
Now, the mini-rant:
I found this picture in a gallery of vintage erotic illustrations. The artwork is probably French, but was published about a hundred years ago in an erotic book printed in Russian. The art is uncopyrighted and uncopyrightable. It cannot be owned.
Since the gallery was quite handsome and contained many vintage erotic gems, I right-clicked this image with the intent of saving it, blogging about it, and linking to the website where I found it, as per normal. The way most folks reckon such things, such an Erosblog link would be a good thing.
But instead of getting the image, my browser saved something called “spacer.gif”. Huh? So I took a second look.
Turns out the woman who built the website claims copyright on these images, and has taken extraordinary (but ineffective) measures to prevent people from saving or sharing them. When you click an image on that page, a javascript is launched that opens a new window. That window throws up transparent gifs for both image and background, but then calls a .php function that loads the actual image from a protected directory, and defines it as an object background using CSS. The result is that there’s no way, using normal browser tools, to right click and save the image.
Of course, screen capture software works just fine.
So what did this woman accomplish? She annoyed me mildly by interrupting the flow of my blogging, and then she really pissed me off by claiming bogus intellectual property rights she does not have. Worst of all from her perspective, her grabby-fingered effort to maintain possession of this image means that in my mind, she’s not deserving of the usual link courtesy. She went to a lot of effort to shoot herself in the foot.
Here endeth the rant.
Shorter URL for sharing: http://www.erosblog.com/?p=1654
Not to burst your rant bubble, but it is also possible that the web designer of that site was trying to save herself the hassle of having her site’s bandwidth hijacked by those who would merely link to the pics in question. My buddy Ryland, of A Boy and His Computer fame, has a similar set-up: if someone tries to link to or save a pic that is on his site, they’ll get another image instead that says, “You’re trying to steal my bandwidth, and that makes baby Jesus cry.”
Of course, if the woman has actually stated on her site that “All images are copyright © 2088 by Her Royal Dumbass,” something similar, then she’s an idiot.
Something to be said about those old illustrations, though: Makes you wonder what our forefathers knew that we have somehow forgotten, like how to enjoy ourselves…
When I run across this particular issue when getting images for my blog, I use the very helpful feature in Firefox under tools, called Page Info. If you call this up and then go to “Media” is shows all the invidual components of the page, including the jpg under the blank gif file. You can then do a simple “save as”. I still need to resort to screen captures for flash based webpages as this doesn’t work for them.
My mind has been stifled! When I first saw that picture, I thought, “sanitation’! Kind of a clean up before partaking!