While artists and others working with images for a living want a secure copy protection solution for their images on the Internet, the public in general does not want copy protection. Internet users want everything for free and easily obtainable. To appease the masses the web browser makers continually add functions to make web pages and images more easily obtainable, making copy protection a most difficult task to maintain.

If anyone was seeking copy protection prior to the late nineties the only references to be found were published articles theorising about the possibility of preventing unauthorised linking to images. But examples of a working solution could not be found and copy protection for an image displayed in a web browser was non-existent. In fact the expert opinion of every web developer in the world was that copy protection for images on the Internet was impossible.

Anyone doing a search on the topic of 'copy protection' today will return hundreds of links for copy protection solutions and as many articles about how to evade copy protection.

Where did copy protection begin? The beginnings of copy protection and the first effective solutions to appear were two products released to the public by ArtistScope in 1998. One was a perl script for preventing unauthorised linking to images on web sites, and the other was an image encryption solution written in pure Java that runs on all computers. Image encryption was a major innovation and a first for the copy protection of digital images displayed on the web.

Encrypted images remain as the best solution for protecting images displayed on web page. They are also protected on the server from company staff and web hosting staff.