Post
18
CaraArchive highlights a broader reality of putting data online: once something is publicly accessible, it becomes extremely difficult to guarantee that it will remain under your control.
If there is information or artwork that you absolutely do not want copied, archived, scraped, downloaded, or used by others, the safest option is still not to publish it publicly in the first place. That may sound obvious, but the internet was fundamentally designed to move and reproduce information, and there are countless ways to retrieve publicly accessible images:from ordinary browser tools and web scraping to automated or agentic systems.
That does not mean artists should simply accept every possible use of their work. Artists deserve meaningful control, attribution, compensation, and reasonable ways to express how their work may be used. But treating the technology and peopple using it itself as the enemy is unlikely to solve the underlying problem.
There probably isn't a technical solution that can make a publicly visible image simultaneously viewable by everyone and impossible to copy. The realistic goal should therefore be to create better norms, incentives, licensing systems, and tools around how that content is used.
Like, we can imagine a future where every artist gets his/her own credentials and some kind of fingerprint done just like blockchain works. But that requires substantial cooperation among organizations, companies and individuals.
Technology and art are not inherently opposing sides though.
If there is information or artwork that you absolutely do not want copied, archived, scraped, downloaded, or used by others, the safest option is still not to publish it publicly in the first place. That may sound obvious, but the internet was fundamentally designed to move and reproduce information, and there are countless ways to retrieve publicly accessible images:from ordinary browser tools and web scraping to automated or agentic systems.
That does not mean artists should simply accept every possible use of their work. Artists deserve meaningful control, attribution, compensation, and reasonable ways to express how their work may be used. But treating the technology and peopple using it itself as the enemy is unlikely to solve the underlying problem.
There probably isn't a technical solution that can make a publicly visible image simultaneously viewable by everyone and impossible to copy. The realistic goal should therefore be to create better norms, incentives, licensing systems, and tools around how that content is used.
Like, we can imagine a future where every artist gets his/her own credentials and some kind of fingerprint done just like blockchain works. But that requires substantial cooperation among organizations, companies and individuals.
Technology and art are not inherently opposing sides though.