Picture Theft Tracking Tool (PTTT)

[kuebi]

Just an idea:
Writing a script which adds to every user called (full size) picture 3 little (encoded?) strings to EXIF or in another hidden and more safe area:

• unix time stamp of download
• user IP address
• url which hosts the picture (could be done once during upload procedure)

When you see your picture somewhere else, you can first check "is it really my picture?" and in case it's true, track when it was downloaded. Together with the IP address you can identify the person which downloaded the picture, when you contact his/her provider and if it's in a country which respects certain copyright issues.

Discussion
Well, you can identify the person which abuses your picture(s) on his/her homepage w/o adding the 3 issues to the picture. But in case of a more complicated theft chain - someone else made the download and hand it or sold it to s.o. else, you'll get the starting point of the chain too.

I do it similar on my homepage (not the one in my signiture) for a different purpose. I add unique email addresses to the HTML output, containing:
encoded unix time stamp (dot) encoded IP (at) mydomain.tld
When I check my mailbox for
* (at) mydomain.tld
I get all the spam mails, which have their origin by spam bots. With both IP and time, I can contact the provider e.g. by abuse (at)provider (dot) tld
and do my complaint.
O.k. I don't do it in case of tld's like .cn etc.. And maybe it doesn't really help in the fight against spam, it's quite interesting to track the bots and how quick they distributed the captured email addresses.

If s.o. is interested in the few lines of the "faked email addresses for tracking spam bots", I can post it here and you can add it into your anycontent.php

Kuebi