Lesson learned: LCD monitors are absolutely horrible at interlacing. And you can, of course, put them back together with one line of JavaScript. As he says, it's futile. People should stop doing this. Yawn.

I am associated with a... certain industry... (ahem) which frequently finds its content reposted (and it wouldn't be right or proper of me to identify any further, but I'm sure it's a moderately generalised problem).

One must be realistic about these things - if we're going to publish things, some people are going to pirate them and that's that. It leaves our control to some degree when we let it loose, regardless of what legal rights we may have. We're going to find them plastered all over Tumblr or TPB or something no matter what we (or Tumblr!) do. That is not necessarily all a negative, especially if it might drive interest and traffic, which may be worth more than any one or two pieces of content for some. If we get enough customers to support ourselves and what we do, that's fine (and we can thank our loyal repeat customers for that; many others are simply not in such a position).

"The invisible wall" might be worth it as a courtesy "please don't save this image" thing, but developer tools exist in browsers, so that really is only a courtesy thing: anything else is a fantasy and nothing else is really workable, but perhaps it presents a sort of reasonable-ish balance, if it doesn't degrade anyone's experience and if people are at least aware we'd prefer that not to happen on balance. I feel the same about any light DRM (for example, for PC gaming, I'd say Steam is fairly "courtesy DRM" compared to its peers, excepting its peers like GOG that have no DRM at all).

(I'm also a reverse-engineer of some experience, so I've found myself analysing others' solutions in other industries quite a lot over the years - it's interesting to look back and see how my own opinions on this matter have evolved from a vehement rejection of any DRM as a matter of principle, to a slightly more nuanced position that it is occasionally not devilspawn but we'd still have a better world without it and anything that may cause users any inconvenience is completely unacceptable.)

Fairly discreet and tasteful watermarking is all we've ever found to be a reasonable solution. What we see when people do repost them, as a result, is more sales - when a few people obviously like what they saw and looked it up. Not a lot, but some. Yay. Have we gained more than we've "lost" (not that we ever had those in the first place)? I don't know, I don't have a crystal ball to guess at events that have never happened, but we've gained some as a result of this, and some is always better than none.

Except those people who edit or crop out the watermarks then reblog them. Fuck those people. That gets right up my nose; there's piracy, and then there's plagiarism, and that's how I interpret that one - it feels like they're taking credit for it (and if they are, that's dangerous: people might think they know what they're doing and get themselves in dangerous situations), or at least they're definitely removing ours, which is irksome particularly when you see a comment thread asking for, as the parlance goes, "sauce" (the source of the content). Those are people who wanted more, dammit, and you cropped out the thing that could have linked them where to get more, and since it's been reposted, they probably don't even know. That's just putting barriers in people's way for no good reason. (Thank you for those few that do reverse image searches in such cases and find us that way anyway, you're heroes. ♥)

Any thoughts?