Image theft is very popular on the web. Many users use images from third party websites, not realising that they are violating copyright laws. Website owners often shy away from prosecuting the image thief as it is accompanied with burden - and very often useless when the thief is located in a foreign country. So why not prevent the theft itself?

Image theft prevention can be made by different methods:

1. Image camouflage
With this method, an image is assigned to the background of a table cell (the image that will be displayed) and an image with only 1 px size is placed into that table cell. When the image is right clicked ('Save image as'), the (unusable) 1 px image is saved, not the table cell background.

2. Deactivate right mouse key
The download of an image can be prevented by deactivating the menu item 'Save image as' by program code. But this means a restriction of usability.

Both 1. and 2. can be bypassed by users who are skilled and familiar with programming code. So they are quite better than nothing, but not the best way to prevent image theft.

3. Watermark
A watermark showing a copyright text is added to the original image. The image can be viewed as before with no significant quality restrictions. But it makes the image unusable for further use and can be removed -if at all- with a very high effort only. KISS Advertiser uses this technique since version 1.5.68 and has a built-in refinement: the original image on the server is not changed, only the displayed image contains the watermark. The watermark's opacity (opposite of transparency) can be adjusted by the administrator from 1% (almost invisible) to 99% (almost opaque). And at last the advert owner can remove the watermark by simply clicking a checkbox..

For watermarks creation, an image manipulation function is required on the server. Most servers offer the GD Library functions to manage this. KISS Advertiser uses the GD Library on your server to mark all images of your adverts in order to prevent image theft.