AOL web troubles.. New AOL speedup seems to be a slowdown

Fri Jan 30 21:13:15 UTC 2004

On Friday, January 30, 2004 2:20 PM [GMT-5=EST], JC Dill
<nanog at vo.cnchost.com> wrote:

> At 09:43 PM 1/29/2004, "Brian Bruns" <bruns at 2mbit.com> wrote:
>> Properly implemented watermarking won't be affected by the recompression.
>> It may not be as clear to the program as it would be if it was in its old
>> format, but its still legible.
>
> That's *visible* watermarking, not invisible *digital* watermarking which
> is hidden in the image file and marks the image as the property of the
> copyright owner.  If AOL's recompression technique is stripping out the
> digital watermark (can anyone here verify this?), then:
>
> AOL is copying and redistributing the image in a new format *without the
> permission of the copyright holder* in a way that A) makes AOL money and B)
> removes protections that the copyright holder had placed on the image to
> help keep third parties from reproducing the image without permission.
>
> and in doing so:
>
> IMHO they are infringing on the copyright of those who have placed the
> digital watermark in the image.
>
> jc

As far as I know, they don't tamper with digital watermarks.  Frankly, unless
you know the program that created them, its very hard to figure out where a
digital watermark is, as they are designed to be completely transparent and
invisible to pretty much everything but the identifying program.  If they were
visible, it would be simple enough to strip it out and take the image.

Visible watermarking shouldn't be too badly affected by the compression
either - I guess I could throw up some of my samples if people here would be
interested in the difference in quality between normal images, AOL ART
compressed images, etc so you can get an idea if you dont already know what we
are talking about.

The most common side affect of the AOL ART compression is color banding -
where smooth gradients are turned into color streaks of solid colors.  The
other thing is loss of detail on areas where color is very similar (ie: skin
tones).

-- 
Brian Bruns
The Summit Open Source Development Group
Open Solutions For A Closed World / Anti-Spam Resources
http://www.sosdg.org

The AHBL - http://www.ahbl.org