[bpowah]

What do they do for almost-white images? Hopefully at some threshold they switch to black test. Even at that, a black/white tiled checkerboard image would leave the url illegible. They should have outlined the white text in black.

Also, it looks fairly easy for an "unfair use"-er to "heal" the watermark away. They should consider a watermark with higher entropy. (like a stipple-shaded box or one with subtle random variation in shade around the box edge.)

[miahi]

You don't really need a higher entropy. It's enough to have a strong enough shade, so the shaded part loses enough color information that when you undo the shade that part looks posterized. That way an "attacker" needs to work a lot more on the picture, as it's not easy to add the lost color information again without adding a blur to that part.

[mceachen]

Looks like the background is adaptive:

http://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/chiufen-village-high...

[bpowah]

Yes, they clearly thought thru the white-image issue: http://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/ice-extreme-close-up... The box is just a low-contrast region (not adaptive). But I still think there will be lots of conditions where it will be tough to read. http://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/chess-board-royalty-...

[grkvlt]

If you register and log in, you get a watermark-free image. It even suggests this on the image info page...

[AndrewNoNumbers]

You, sir, are clearly thinking like an engineer.