Several things have been missed in the recent flare-up over Adobe Photoshop’s refusal to import images of currency. (For background, see Ted Bridis’s APstory.)
There’s a hidden gem in the Slashdot discussion, pointing to a comment by Markus Kuhn of Cambridge University. Markus established that some color copiers look for a special pattern of five circles (usually yellow or orange in color), and refuse to make high-res copies of documents containing them. Sure enough, the circles are common on paper money. (On the new U.S. $20 bills, they’re the zeroes in the little yellow “20”s that pepper the background on the back side of the bill.) Markus called the special five-dot pattern the “constellation EURion” because he first spotted it on Euro notes.
But reported experiments by others show that Photoshop is looking for something other than EURion. For example, Jon Sullivan says that Photoshop refuses to load this image, which nobody would mistake for currency.
There’s been lots of talk, too, about artists’ legitimate desire to use currency images, and lots of criticism of Adobe for stopping them from doing so. But check out the U.S. government’s legal limitations on representations of currency, which are much more restrictive than I expected. Representations of U.S. currency must be one-sided, and must differ substantially in size from real bills, and all copies (including computer files) must be destroyed after their final use. Photographs or other likenesses of other U.S. securities, or non-U.S. currency, must satisfy all of the preceding rules, and must be in black and white. (Other countries’ rules are available too.)
Finally, the European Central Bank (ECB) is considering recommending legislation to the EU to require inclusion of currency recognition into digital imaging products. Predictably, the ECB’s proposal is wildly overbroad, applying to “any equipment, software, or other product[]” that is “capable of capturing images or transferring images into, or out of, computer systems, or of manipulating or producing digital images for the purposes of counterfeiting”. As usual, the “capable of” construction captures just about every general purpose communication technology in existence – the Internet, for example, is clearly “capable of … transferring images into, or out of, computer systems”. Note to self: it’s way past time to write that piece about the difficulties of regulating general purpose technologies.
[Thanks to Seth Schoen for pointers to some of this information.]
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