The cry of the Web is unmistakable: No to DRM in all its forms. Its uselessness in reducing piracy levels has been proven again and again, but there are certain elements in different markets that insist on the idea of adding more locks on content. Now, it's the turn of the JPEG format. The so-called JPEG Group presented its Privacy & Security initiative, which considers the possibility of extending the existing DRM in the JPEG 2000 format to traditional JPEG.
It is estimated that users connected to the Web load and share about two billion images daily. From the casual selfie or breakfast to enormous galleries containing photos from the latest vacations, people upload everything. Needless to say, this trend will not change in the short term. Social networks want that content on their servers, and the advance of cameras in general (increasingly compact and powerful) only fuels the fire. The vast majority of users adopted the JPEG format to distribute their photos, and nobody denies that it works very well, but those responsible for the JPEG Group are thinking about some changes.
The initiative is called Privacy & Security and proposes several objectives: guarantee the integrity of internal information in an image, reinforce user privacy, and protect intellectual property rights. The first two points focus on metadata, which on more than one occasion have revealed personal details about a user, including their current location. The most prominent web services remove this metadata, but with it also disappears any information linked to the image's authorship. The JPEG 2000 format has several of the necessary mechanisms in its specification; therefore, the plan of the initiative is to extend those mechanisms to traditional JPEG and its variants.
We have no problem with the idea of encrypting metadata and protecting its content instead of arbitrarily deleting it, but any possibility of implementing DRM on JPEG images will cause more problems than it can solve. EFF's presentation to the JPEG Group, which spans 36 pages, explains the multiple negative aspects of DRM in JPEG images, including the fact that DRM does not obey certain copyright limits such as fair use, enables anticompetitive behaviors on the part of the content "owners", ruins interoperability (more than it is already ruined), and most importantly: Its presence reduces the value of the content. In the worst case, nothing stops us from switching to a format with friendlier parameters, but I hope the group thinks twice.
EFF
