I need your feedback!

Background
At deviantART, one of my on-going responsibilities is to find ways of increasing their satisfaction. To learn more about how our members feel, I administered a lengthy survey last December. The survey was very successful and gave us tons of insight into our community's stakeholders. We received some awesome data and feedback--some of which I am still analyzing. As I go through the survey results, I have been addressing any problematic trends as I discover them. One area of concern was the amount of users who felt negatively about deviantART because our website doesn't protect their images from being stolen. Here's some of my personal thoughts...

Some details
A while ago, we had a lot of issues regarding share links on deviation pages. Basically, a portion of users were pissed off because we added Twitter, Facebook, and other sharing buttons on their art pages. They felt that these buttons did not allow them to "be included" in the transaction of sharing their work. Our goal with adding these buttons was to avoid visitors coming to deviantART and sharing artwork by Right Click->Copy Image URL-ing. If users use the proper share links, traffic is sent to the deviation page (with artist info, copyright details, etc.) instead of just the image source. Because we try our best to listen to the community, we added a "discourage sharing" option to the submission process which hides the share links. Well, as you can assume, this does not discourage sharing at all. In fact, it just encourages improper sharing. Because the internet is a free-for-all, there is no way to "discourage sharing" of public images on the internet. If someone wants to share an image or download it as their wallpaper, they will. Regardless of this false sense of control, that's what the portion of the community asked for ...and it's what we implemented.

Image Protection Options
In terms of the dissatisfaction with deviantART's image protection, there is honestly no good solution for protecting images on the internet. Trust me, we've researched it. Heavily. Here are some of the options out there:
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Options

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Pros

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Cons

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Disabling right-click with javascript
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Difficult to save images
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Besides being freaking annoying, visitors can still screenshot, view page source, turn off javascript, or grab it from browser cache.
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  Embedding images into Flash
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Visitors can't right-click to save/copy the image
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Not everyone has Flash plugin, it's slow, and it's a dying technology. Visitors can still screenshot the image.
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Clear image overlay
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Visitors can't right-click to save/copy the real image
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Besides giving visitors a false sense of saving/copying URL of the image, visitors can still screenshot, view page source, turn off page styling, or grab it from browser cache.
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Set image as CSS background-image
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Not as easy to save
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Visitors can still screenshot, view page source, disable CSS, or grab it from browser cache.
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Splice image into 1x1px div tags with background colors
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If you can hide the source image, prevents copying and sharing.
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Will crash most user's browsers and visitors can still screenshot the image.
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Dynamic image file name
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Prevents sharing of images
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Brings users who click the shared URL to a 404 error page. Also doesn't prevent screenshots or saving.
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Digital Watermarks
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Adds additional information to image source (like EXIF data)
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Can always be removed. Doesn't make the image look visually different.
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Visual Watermarks
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Always provides credit to artist
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Invasive and distracting to viewer, can be cropped out or removed if too subtle
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As you can see, none of them provide full image protection. Because watermarks provide the "best" protection, years ago we included automatic watermarking as an option in submission. Beyond that, we always felt that we would be misleading you if we implemented any other possible "solutions".

A Possible Solution?
Regardless, I think we can make a user interface modification that can prevent some improper image sharing by making proper sharing really easy to do--it needs to be easier than Right Click->Copy Image URL. With that in mind, I came up with the following idea. Basically, we would "bury" your artwork under a transparent gif image, and when someone right clicks to copy the image URL, they would be shown a little sharing menu. Easy right? Sure is. Again, this does not "protect" your images from being stolen. It is just overtly encourages better art sharing practices...almost like killing bad behavior with kindness. So, what'cha think?







I'd love to hear you thoughts on this. Can you think of any reasons why we shouldn't implement this like right now?