The JPEG Committee Is “exploring Blockchain” to Put DRM into JPEG

davidgerard.co.uk

31 points·Artemis2··6 comments

Why stop there? Why not emoji?

Why not deprecate sub-32-bit data types? Maybe we should push for chipsets that refuse to print "Hello World" because, as with the Happy Birthday song, someone needs to get their cut.

This is just sad.

So I take it you won't be in on their ICO presale?

I dunno, sounds kind of interesting. Imagine the pain that creators feel when their images get reposted without credit or permission. Sometimes this can even lead to financial losses for the creator.

A lot depends on how this is implemented, but it would be great to have more options than a watermark and low resolution as ways of protecting your work.

Right. So that's a DRM argument which is a whole extra world of pain. But using blockchain? Really? Especially since DRM's of various varieties are well understood, standardised and implemented - can't they just use one of those?

And... if it 'aint broke...

[author here] The mooted plan is to reuse the DRM from JPEG 2000 part 8 - to generalise it to just-plain-JPEG.

As I note in the piece:

> I have heard of one case of someone trying to use JPEG 2000 DRM — a pornographic site selling DRMed pictures around 2009. Customers had to run a Java applet in their web browser. It didn’t work well, and was a tech support nightmare — I was told about it by one of said tech support people. The porn site gave up on this terrible idea very quickly. The Java applet company apparently went bust a few months later.

JPEG 2000 has a few niche users, who are very happy with it - but they hardly ever go past JPEG 2000 Part 1, the bit that's all about better-compressed images.

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