copy proofing your own cd

Posted:
in General Discussion edited January 2014
First off I know no copy proofing is 100% secure. But what I want is to stop the average layman from being able to copy a disc of proof images.



Anyone know where I can begin. I tryed google and the articles that popped up seemed to apply to music discs produced by large companies.



What I'm looking for is basic protection that I can do with my home computer that will allow the client to only look at the image. He will then have to contact me to get copies. Unless he/she circumvents the copy proofing.



Even then though I plan on only having small jpegs that will produce good quality 5x7 prints.



Any help would be great.

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 7
    Not gonna happen.



    As I recall, the "copy protected" CDs are NOT really CDs, technically. They do not legally match the format for CDs and therefore cannot carry the Compact Disc Digital Audio logo on them.



    Said copy-protected CDs actually have little bits of what you could call "garbage data" tossed in where important things like the TOC are. When you burn a CD, the OS and burning software do all that for you the correct way.



    Sure, yours will be data CDs, but the same philosophy applies.
  • Reply 2 of 7
    Quote:

    originally posted by Brad



    Not gonna happen.



    As I recall, the "copy protected" CDs are NOT really CDs, technically. They do not legally match the format for CDs and therefore cannot carry the Compact Disc Digital Audio logo on them.



    Said copy-protected CDs actually have little bits of what you could call "garbage data" tossed in where important things like the TOC are. When you burn a CD, the OS and burning software do all that for you the correct way.





    So the only thing I can do to protect my investment is to make the images a small enough file that if they want better is to contact me.



    I was just hoping that there might be another layer of security that I could add.



    Oh, well



    Thanks.
  • Reply 3 of 7
    You could add digital watermarks to the (flattened medium res) previews on disc.



    Only after contacting you to buy the images would you ship unwatermarked version,

    or perhaps access codes would unlock individual hidden folders on disc.



    Not sure if these hypothetical workarounds solve your problem.



    Depends how you value security vs. ease-of-use vs. image fidelity.
  • Reply 4 of 7
    how about one of those programs that assigns a password to a file that needs to be entered before the file can be viewed. You could just give clients the password. Surely something like this exists?
  • Reply 5 of 7
    liquidrliquidr Posts: 884member
    Quote:

    originally posted by curiousuburb



    You could add digital watermarks to the (flattened medium res) previews on disc.



    Only after contacting you to buy the images would you ship unwatermarked version,

    or perhaps access codes would unlock individual hidden folders on disc.



    Not sure if these hypothetical workarounds solve your problem.



    Depends how you value security vs. ease-of-use vs. image fidelity.



    Quote:

    originally posted by mbezzo



    how about one of those programs that assigns a password to a file that needs to be entered before the file can be viewed. You could just give clients the password. Surely something like this exists?



    The digital watermark may be an idea. I'll have to research it. The idea of a password for files that are full res copyable images isn't going to be good for my idea for my proofing system. The number of images would be more than one CD. I'd like to just send the proof CD, have them choose the images they want prints of and I'd send them full res jpegs with the prints.
  • Reply 6 of 7
    ast3r3xast3r3x Posts: 5,012member
    Depending what you are doing, you probably could create a Photoshop script to add a watermark and take the res down to 72dpi depending on how good you need them to view the quality.



    The best thing you can do is lower the res and add a watermark, watermark alone just makes it harder to 'fix'
  • Reply 7 of 7
    Unless I'm misunderstanding the question (and it's all a bit vague, so that's possible) then these people only need to 'see' the photos and then contact you if they want to buy them, at any res.



    In that case, would a Quicktime slideshow of the images not be sufficient (not to mention cross-platform and likely to work on basically any machine with standard plugins).



    Digital watermarks aren't going to help you much, but just a normal visible watermark may do the trick and you can easily batch process them.
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