DJI can just add some mandatory firmware upgrade process that offloads your footage to the mothership, and 99.9999% will agree to everything without reading.
Wouldn't be surprised if some will tout a "better and safer experience" if you use their cloud services...
How would that work? I would imagine that any system to implement this would necessarily be something that AI tools could replicate, wouldn’t it?
Remember how, in the 1970s and 80s, they used to have little booths surrounded by parking-lot, and you could drive up to the Fotomat booth and drop off your 110 or 35mm film, and they would go develop it and bring back your negatives and prints, and you could drive your Dodge Charger or your Ford Fairlane to come pick them up?
And then, the pharmacies got in on this, because pharmacies are where the chemicals are at anyway. And at a pharmacy, you could have film developed, and you could also get prints, and reprints, and larger-sized prints, and framed photos and albums and greeting cards and all sorts of things.
And this pharmaceutical extension tradition carries on into the present-day. Now you can waltz into CVS or Walgreens or Wal-Mart, you can bring your USB or your microSD card, or just your phone with a cable, and you can plug in your USB or thunk down a disc, and load it into their kiosk computer, and some even have scanners. And then you can order instant photo prints! And they still can sell you albums, and framed photos, and large-format prints, and posters and whatnot.
Here's the trouble, though: phone cameras don't generate the right-sized images.
I was at a Walgreens and they were selling, like, 8x10 and 5x7 and other standard photo-sized frames and prints. And I upload a photo, and the kiosk complains. Kiosk says it's low-resolution. Kiosk shows me a sample preview, and the edges are cut off.
So I chat with the clerk there, and she tells me to just take a screenshot of the image and it'll work. LOL a screenshot, when the resolution is too low already?
And so eventually I figured out that, even if I took a 50 megapixel photograph with the phone's sophisticated camera, it would not print correctly. I told the clerk: this phone takes photos like a TV set. It's in 16:9 or 4:3 aspect ratios. Those are not the same as 8x10 photos!
So the pharmacies have all this tooling for conventional cameras. I suppose a DSLR could still turn out 8x10 photos. I suppose I could "crop" a photo down in my smartphone on Android. But what I really wanted was to download a PD photo from Commons.wikimedia.org and print that out in an 11x17 or larger. And that was not working out so well.
Phone cameras today are producing really impeccable photos of really impossible aspect ratios. There's a ton of tooling that is specifically made for photographs that were based on the size of negatives and the size of photo paper in the last 70 decades or so. Kodak and Fujifilm and their ilk are still haunting us.
Thankfully there are more online services. Everything I put now into Google Photos. Google Photos will happily generate a photobook and they'll even drop-ship them to my family. I have sent them cool photobooks in the past. I never got to peek at them. No complaints. Google Photos doesn't mind when your photos are a weird aspect-ratio. Google Photos will adapt. Resistance is futile. Prepare to be shown your memories.
Then you can check the signature using the company’s public keys.
If you make edits to it, the editing app will package the new metadata, edited photo data, the original signature, and sign it again.
Now you have a chain of “changes” and can inspect and validate its history. It works for video and audio too.
As long as the private keys aren’t leaked, there’ll be no way to fabricate the signatures.
> ...I have sent them cool photobooks [printed and shipped by Google Photos] in the past. I never got to peek at them.
So you have no idea if the photos are stretched or cut off. (Given how many folks fail to complain about [0] godawfully misconfigured televisions that stretch, squash, or otherwise mangle what they're displaying, I wouldn't take the absence of complaints as evidence of correctly printed images.)
[0] Or even notice.
Frankly, I find the justification you provide preposterous and dangerous.
The sad reality is that apparently many customers will find it believable (in the .0001% of cases when they actually read what they are agreeing to).
It seems to me that any "paper trail" scheme of the sort you describe would have to solve the problems of DRM to work: making the elements that report on the real world (in this case, the CCD) tamper-proof, making the encryption key impossible to extract, designing robust watermarks to avoid analog holes, etc.
Canon's high-end DSLRs used to have a module to sign the RAW files as they came off the sensor, for use in law enforcement and other sectors. This was back as far as 2011.
I don’t think C2PA’s goal is to completely prevent this type of thing, but to make it hard enough to stop low-effort attempts.
This, like DRM, will probably be an arms race, and future solutions will look nothing like what I described.
But then again, the spec has been out for more than a year, and I haven’t seen anyone big bothering to implement it. Maybe it’s a flop already.