So there will be advancements I bring up that some will not be a fan of. Take any picture on the web. In it’s existing form it is to some varrying degree copy protected. If you take the image and modify it by any digital method, it will retain either it’s original details( perhaps you run it through a color filter) or it will leave some digital evidence of it’s original self (perhaps you blur the image to some degree). To “lose” the copyright, you have to “lose” the image. This won’t always be the case. Our minds take the group of details that we see in front of us at all times and are constantly trying to make associations. Take a persons face for instance. To our minds it is a collection of shapes that our minds are easily able to recognize as a particular person, or that of a stranger. Similarly, when we look at an artistic rendering of a particllar person, we usually can see the similarities and as long as the artwork is at all decent, we immediately know who the artist is emulating. An extreme example of this is political cartoon work. Certain important details are greatly exaggerated, and yet you immediately know who the character is, being portrayed. So now look at all those images out on the web. The technology currently exists that would allow for a algorithm based process to be run against any image that would first determine what type of image it is, who or what is in the image, the orignial source of the image and it’s copyright status, and then simply remove that copyright by altering the image in any number of ways that retain the complete recognition of the original image, yet are completely unlinkable to that original work. Adobe has many methods of applying filters to images, yielding differing results, but as mentioned above, the process can easily be traced backwards, or it modifies the image to such a degree, that it can’t be recognized. How? Well a book could be written of all the possibilities. Perhaps the software recognizes that the picutre is a portrait. Most cameras can easily already recognize the faces in a picture. The greater determination can be made about the image, the better and quicker the software can make a change that accomplishes the desired result. As I see it there are 2 factors that give an image characteristics that are traceable. First, overlay. If you traced any image by hand onto a tranceparency, you would have a very distinct organization of points on both the original and the traced image that would tie the two together. Second, is individual pixel characteristics. For instance if you had two images of a forest, and you zoomed into one corner of the image and noticed the details of one particular tree branch were exactly the same, you would know you had a copy. So if you wanted to change an image to remove evidence of it’s origin, you would have to address both of these factors. The easiest way to handle the “overlay” problem is the randomization of the overall image, specifically small details like the proportions of the various features of the face. Subtle changes to the proportion would yield a face that would still be recognized. I have experimented with this on a small scale, on the computer and by hand, doing portrait drawings. The brain accepts a wild amount of subtle changes to the overall picture before it starts to register the image as “distorted.” To handle the second issue, the detail recognition, you would simply randomize the pixels individually, or as a group. This could be done currently, as easily as any Adobe graphics filter, but in future incarnations, as our software recognizes more details and is able to categorize them, (such as looking at an image of a tree and recognizing branches and leaves), the inevitable result will be the computer being able to do things like take in a picture of a forest and recreate it by perhaps replacing al the pine trees with weeping willows, or instantly turning a portrait picture of a white man into a black man, and doing it accurately. The ramifications of such things are quite far reaching, and I will cover more specifically in a future post. This is far simpler than most would think, and a one click solution would be pretty snazzy for folks who are just trying to have a particular visual and they don’t want to get snagged using some random web photo that perhaps isn’t marked as copyrighted and turns out to be. True, there are people out there making a living selling photos online, and I am not in the business of diminishing other’s work or value. I’m just in the business of looking ahead, to a world where they, like the musician, need to structure their price and availability at a reasonable level. One that encourages sales and not piracy. Another way to say it is having people buy your product because they want to and not because they have to.