Joy Garnett forwarded an article on the AltaVista Photo Finder, an
addition to the popular search engine that returns images rather than
web pages. The article included a series of urls:

AltaVista Photo Finder
http://image.altavista.com/

AltaVista Photo Finder, and how to keep your images "unfound"
http://www.photodude.com/av.htm

AltaVista Help: Excluding Pages From Photo Finder
http://image.altavista.com/exclude.html

brad brace replied:

I *welcome* this additional distribution service!

t whid added:

the altavista photo finder is great great great!!!

Colin Keefe also replied with a series of resources for protecting
digital objects:

http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/courses/is290-1/f96/watermark.html - general
resources
http://www.cognicity.com/products.htm - image, video, audio watermarking
http://www.signumtech.com/ - suresign watermarking
http://www.imprimatur.alcs.co.uk/ - yet another watermarking co
http://www.excalib.com/ - yet another, yada yada

And, of course:
www.digimarc.com

watermarking list (very very techie, with very low list volume–post
only if you have 3-4 pages of watermarking code to troubleshoot):
http://ltswww.epfl.ch:1248/kutter/watermarking/

Most of these companies are involved in watermarking in addition to
data-hiding, which is what the company I work for (www.stockobjects.com)
is concerned with. But data-hiding is interesting in of itself, and
you're going to begin seeing it especially in the music
industry–downloadable music clips with built-in tracking numbers,
expiration dates, and perhaps metadata about the purchaser…

Point is, the problem of protecting intellectual property in a
transparent way, with embedded metadata like licensor, licensee,
versioning, expiration etc. is being thought about pretty seriously. You
can think of this data as operating invisibly, embedded in the data
object and storing the kind of info you might store in a browser cookie.

So far the big advances are in digital images, video and audio. There
are some propietary file formats which have protection built-in, like
ThingMaker (an interactive animation format).

It's my suspicion that somebody, somewhere will develop a standards
committee to oversee the evolution of this new protection issue, much in
the same way there are encryption standards. The body of the committee
will probably be filled with tech officers from the above listed
companies, with some posts filled with members of other related
committees–JPEG standards, MPEG standards, encryption standards all
bear on the issue.

And this will mean that the data-tracking possibilities of the internet
will really begin to bear fruit for marketers and the like. In the U.S.,
anyway–the Europeans seem to be more evolved in terms of privacy
policies.

Fodder for information paranoiacs.