> It only annoys honest folk who just want 
> to do benign things, like add a cel image to 
> their wishlist saying "one like THIS beauty!".

...and this is exactly the point. It's not 
supposed to stop anything. It's supposed to annoy 
to the point where one will just go somewhere 
else to steal things after one or two.

The primary concern seems to be the wholesale 
copying of large images off RS websites. For one 
reason or another (image quality usually), our 
members upload images that are 500-600+ px in 
each dimension. What we do is we both reduce 
image quality by shrinking the image dimensions 
to a more "unsuitable" size for stealing and 
inconvenience the stealer by requiring screenshot 
as the only method for taking the image. (We also 
now have the ability to preserve the zoomed full-
size scans with a password.)

Photoshop is a several hundred dollar piece of 
software when acquired legitimately. Even a 
shareware screenshot program would require some 
effort to learn. One would have to know how to 
take a screencap, how to mask out the piece you 
want, and to crop into a new image. It's a non-
trivial thing for the vast majority of image 
thieves to do.

Many of the stolen images we find (over 60-70%) 
still have the same names as when they were saved 
from the victim RS website. Clearly, these 
thieves are lazy and don't value effort. If these 
few changes can cut that behavior in half 
overnight, I think that's progress and I think 
many would agree.

Do I fully understand the concern over a cel 
image taken from a website when one owns the 
actual cel? Not entirely. But that's not to say 
that I won't try to understand if others feel 
that way and work towards a satisfactory solution.

So yes, we want to annoy. Mission accomplished?

jn