Tired one day of chasing all those content thieves and manipulators, veteran cartoonist and illustrator Neelabh Banerjee put up on his Facebook wall: “Feel free to steal, copy, publish, and ruin my collection.”
“There is no clear way to stop all this,” he says. “Even major publications use my cartoons and drawings with their social-media posts. I didn’t know how else to handle it.”
College student Raghav Sirsikar, active on Facebook and Instagram as amateur photographer, had a similar jolt when going through a travel website while planning his summer holidays. “Last year I went trekking in the Great Himalayan National Park. I took some great pictures and posted them on the social media. A website picked one of the shots from there and used it with an article, which had an elaborate caption but no mention of me or my social-media account,” he says.
A next-generation tech-savvy Raghav downloaded the picture and put it on Google image search. More shocking was to notice at least three variations of the same picture with slight changes in colours and composition. It broke his heart.
Content authenticity is a big issue that media and publications face. If filtering fake news from the mainstream media was hard enough, there came the social media. But software giant Adobe might have the answer. During its annual creative conference Adobe Max in Los Angeles recently, it announced a content authenticity initiative developed with ‘The New York Times’ and Twitter as industry standard for digital content attribution.
Whom To Trust
Fake news not only spreads quickly, but also has dangerous impact on consumers, many of whom would never know the real story. “It comes in visual, video, text, or package form,” said online journalist Harikrishna, fact checker in a media company. He says: “Checking the authenticity of an image is easier than finding the original and its creator. It is a big trust issue, confuses readers’ mind, and they start looking at even the most authentic information with suspicion. To check if the content is authentic, either you challenge the fake news on the social media or approach the ‘fact check’ portals.”
A few years ago, someone copied Rajkamal Aich’s works from the internet, displayed those in Kolkata, and even got the media coverage. “Drawing inspiration from a work of art is fine, but claiming it as your own isn’t,” said Aich, senior graphic designer and art consultant with a big media house. “Any artist or photographer with a big portfolio that gets thicker and thicker every day will find it difficult to get copyright for all works, so many artists ignore these thefts to avoid long-drawn legal battles,” he says.
Consumer Empowered
With the expansion of digital content, people want to know if the content they see is genuine, says Dana Rao, executive vice-president and general counsel of Adobe. “While this is a formidable challenge, we are thrilled to be championing the adoption of an industry-wide content attribution system. It is critical for technology and media companies to come together for empowering consumers for better evaluation and understanding of the online content,” says Rao.
Adobe is developing an opt-in system that will allow creators and publishers to attach attribution data securely to the content they choose to share. It will let authors verify that their content receives proper attribution and provide consumers with an attribution trail, for greater confidence about the authenticity of the content.
Your Mark On Your Work
Scott Belsky, chief product officer and executive vice-president of Creative Cloud, said: “We are helping creators put their mark on their work and how that attribution accompanies content across platforms, post, and stories.” Adobe hopes that large number of content creators will choose the system when launched and consumers will expect original content with attribution. It is interesting to see how this system works, explains Belsky.
This new system would record what the content creator does to a piece of work, what edits he makes to an image, and what effects he applies.
When consumers come across it on a website or other platform, they can view easily who created it, where the image or video came from, and how it was edited. The consumer will have the information to judge the trustworthiness of the content, and creators will be assured of credit.
Fight For Right
At Adobe MAX 2019, Adobe demonstrated a prototype of its content-attribution technology embedded in Photoshop. The image would carry not only the original information but also the editing history. “It is good news,” said Aich. “This system will bring transparency in the online world indeed.” Sirsikar said: “Nothing is more satisfying than getting the credit you deserve. It is your right.”
(The writer was in Los Angeles on Adobe’s invitation)
“There is no clear way to stop all this,” he says. “Even major publications use my cartoons and drawings with their social-media posts. I didn’t know how else to handle it.”
College student Raghav Sirsikar, active on Facebook and Instagram as amateur photographer, had a similar jolt when going through a travel website while planning his summer holidays. “Last year I went trekking in the Great Himalayan National Park. I took some great pictures and posted them on the social media. A website picked one of the shots from there and used it with an article, which had an elaborate caption but no mention of me or my social-media account,” he says.
A next-generation tech-savvy Raghav downloaded the picture and put it on Google image search. More shocking was to notice at least three variations of the same picture with slight changes in colours and composition. It broke his heart.
Content authenticity is a big issue that media and publications face. If filtering fake news from the mainstream media was hard enough, there came the social media. But software giant Adobe might have the answer. During its annual creative conference Adobe Max in Los Angeles recently, it announced a content authenticity initiative developed with ‘The New York Times’ and Twitter as industry standard for digital content attribution.
Whom To Trust
Fake news not only spreads quickly, but also has dangerous impact on consumers, many of whom would never know the real story. “It comes in visual, video, text, or package form,” said online journalist Harikrishna, fact checker in a media company. He says: “Checking the authenticity of an image is easier than finding the original and its creator. It is a big trust issue, confuses readers’ mind, and they start looking at even the most authentic information with suspicion. To check if the content is authentic, either you challenge the fake news on the social media or approach the ‘fact check’ portals.”
A few years ago, someone copied Rajkamal Aich’s works from the internet, displayed those in Kolkata, and even got the media coverage. “Drawing inspiration from a work of art is fine, but claiming it as your own isn’t,” said Aich, senior graphic designer and art consultant with a big media house. “Any artist or photographer with a big portfolio that gets thicker and thicker every day will find it difficult to get copyright for all works, so many artists ignore these thefts to avoid long-drawn legal battles,” he says.
Consumer Empowered
With the expansion of digital content, people want to know if the content they see is genuine, says Dana Rao, executive vice-president and general counsel of Adobe. “While this is a formidable challenge, we are thrilled to be championing the adoption of an industry-wide content attribution system. It is critical for technology and media companies to come together for empowering consumers for better evaluation and understanding of the online content,” says Rao.
Adobe is developing an opt-in system that will allow creators and publishers to attach attribution data securely to the content they choose to share. It will let authors verify that their content receives proper attribution and provide consumers with an attribution trail, for greater confidence about the authenticity of the content.
Your Mark On Your Work
Scott Belsky, chief product officer and executive vice-president of Creative Cloud, said: “We are helping creators put their mark on their work and how that attribution accompanies content across platforms, post, and stories.” Adobe hopes that large number of content creators will choose the system when launched and consumers will expect original content with attribution. It is interesting to see how this system works, explains Belsky.
This new system would record what the content creator does to a piece of work, what edits he makes to an image, and what effects he applies.
When consumers come across it on a website or other platform, they can view easily who created it, where the image or video came from, and how it was edited. The consumer will have the information to judge the trustworthiness of the content, and creators will be assured of credit.
Fight For Right
At Adobe MAX 2019, Adobe demonstrated a prototype of its content-attribution technology embedded in Photoshop. The image would carry not only the original information but also the editing history. “It is good news,” said Aich. “This system will bring transparency in the online world indeed.” Sirsikar said: “Nothing is more satisfying than getting the credit you deserve. It is your right.”
(The writer was in Los Angeles on Adobe’s invitation)
