Dear Damian,
Thanks for this.
Believe it or not, we do have a sense of humour here and your email raised a smile or two in the office (actually – just one!).
Please forgive the standard text of the email sent yesterday. We send out dozens of such emails each month as part of our policy of checking on potential copyright infringements and have to use wording to cover a variety of situations.
We have a responsibility to protect our artists’ copyright as well as our own, hence our diligence in checking all potentially unauthorised uses.
Of course, simple links (such as yours) are absolutely fine because no copying is involved. In fact they are the essence of what the internet’s all about and are to be positively encouraged. If I’d have been able to find the link yesterday I wouldn’t – of course – have sent the email at all. The difficulty was – I couldn’t find it anywhere, and therefore sent a precautionary email with the screengrab.
If the Digimarc report finds links (in addition to downloads) then that is very silly indeed and a great waste of everyone’s time. I’ll be contacting them to clarify exactly what’s what. So – thank you for highlighting this.
Kind regards,
———————————–
Bxxxxxx Hxxxxxxx
Copyright OfficerNational Portrait Gallery
St Martin’s Place
London
WC2H 0HE
06Jan05 — 1
The link is a red herring, its obvious that Digimarc has thrown up a “watermark” on some random image on your website that seems to match one of theirs, seeing as images can be manipulated in a variety of ways then the watermark comparison will allow for some “fuzziness” in its matching algorithm.
Basically, your good self pictured on the top-right might be perceived to be a near digital likeness of Charles Darwin.
P.S. the excuse to hyperlink again was not entirely accidental 🙂