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D300: Can't embed © character neither in comment nor in copyright

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Jim Fenton said:
The copyright symbol which you and the rest of us wish for doesn't
exist as an in camera symbol in the D300.
--
Click to expand...
You can't use Camera Control Pro to put it in from a PC either.

Some people use (c), but then surely the "Copyright" field implies that it contains the copyright holder. So really no need to include © or (c), as that's what the Copyright field means anyway?
 
Nikon didn't include the copyright symbol in the character set. The best you can do is use (c), which isn't technically correct but hopefully expresses your intent.
--
--Bob
 
From:

http://support.nikontech.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/15852/related/1/kw/focus/page/2/r_id/166

How can I add the copyright symbol in the camera's "Image Comment" field?

How can I put the copyright © symbolin the camera's "Image Comment" field?

The "Image Comment" field is a standard EXIF data field and as such can only store standard characters and cannot hold extended, double byte, special characters like the © symbol. Many users simply use "(c)" -- parentheses surrounding a lowercase "c" -- in the comment field to represent the copyright symbol.

Of course you should also register your copyright through the U.S. Government Copyright office to further protect your rights.

http://www.copyright.gov/register/

Details
Answer ID 15852
Products Digital SLR
D40
D40x
D50
D60
D70
D70s
D80
D100
D200
D300
D1H
D1X
D2H
D2Hs
D2X
D2Xs
D3
General
Categories General Information
Usage
Date Created 05/19/2008 12:48 PM
Date Updated 05/19/2008 12:48 PM
 
Look at my posts from 5 years ago.

Nikon eventually admitted it's due to a double bit requirement on some standard character set.

Smart people eh? Making 10,000 dollar professional cameras that can't generate copyright on files. But you do get three styles of mathematical brackets should you ever need then.
--
All I can afford is a (old) half-frame from Thailand.
 
Mr Fartleberry said:
Smart people eh? Making 10,000 dollar professional cameras that can't
generate copyright on files.
Click to expand...
If you paid $10,000 for a D100, D200 or D300 (the subjects of this forum), then by that definition you're even smarter.

The solution is a utility Nikon offers for free, and includes with every camera - Nikon Transfer can be set to change the copyright field AND include the proper legal copyright symbol at the time the memory card is downloaded.

If you're worried about copyright images being stolen before you even download them from your memory card, you've got bigger issues to deal with than the simple fact that the camera can't generate a copyright symbol on it's own.

If this minor inconvenience and it's workaround is a show-stopper for you, by all means, go find another camera, and (perhaps more importantly) join that camera's forum. Feel free to bash our camera for it's inability to deal with the copyright symbol as a measure of our inferiority to your new brand. If you feel all the advantages the D300 has to offer are completely offset and nullified by it's inabilty to include a copyright symbol in the IPTC field, I can respect your decision to go with a camera that does.

--
  • Arved
'Highlights next to shadows to create detail, depth, dimension and added color saturation.' - David Ziser
 
Robert Cohen said:
Nikon didn't include the copyright symbol in the character set. The
best you can do is use (c), which isn't technically correct but
hopefully expresses your intent.
Click to expand...
(c) is not a legal form of Copyright in the US, so intent is all you would be getting. The approved notices are the symbol, "Copyright", or "Copr."

Nikon only uses ASCII 8-bit characters in the firmware of their cameras at present, thus the Copyright symbol is not available.

--
Thom Hogan
author, Complete Guides to Nikon bodies (19 and counting)
http://www.bythom.com
 
Mr Fartleberry said:
Look at my posts from 5 years ago.

Nikon eventually admitted it's due to a double bit requirement on
some standard character set.

Smart people eh? Making 10,000 dollar professional cameras that can't
generate copyright on files. But you do get three styles of
mathematical brackets should you ever need then.
--
All I can afford is a (old) half-frame from Thailand.
Click to expand...
Why are you blaming Nikon for the decisions made 40+ years ago by a bunch of computer engineers/programmers (who had absolutely no need for a copyright symbol, and much need for three styles of brackets)?
 
Thom Hogan said:
(c) is not a legal form of Copyright in the US, so intent is all you
would be getting. The approved notices are the symbol, "Copyright",
or "Copr."
Click to expand...
That's interesting. I'm pretty sure that in the UK you don't have to claim or assert copyright - it's just there on any work you produce. So adding "Copyright", ©, (c) or whatever makes no difference to the status of the work; it's just a reminder to anyone seeing it.

Are you saying that in the US without ©, "Copyright" or "Copr." then you may not have copyright protection?
 
Thom Hogan said:
Robert Cohen said:
Nikon didn't include the copyright symbol in the character set. The
best you can do is use (c), which isn't technically correct but
hopefully expresses your intent.
Click to expand...
(c) is not a legal form of Copyright in the US, so intent is all you
would be getting. The approved notices are the symbol, "Copyright",
or "Copr."

Nikon only uses ASCII 8-bit characters in the firmware of their
cameras at present, thus the Copyright symbol is not available.
Click to expand...
And yet when the '©' character is copied from the subject line and pasted in a file saved as 8-bit ASCII text, when reopened with Wordpad or Notepad it still displays as the '©' character (checked with Arial, Courier and Times Roman). Examining the file with a hex editor shows that it was saved as a single 8-bit byte, Hex A9, so that seems to indicate that Nikon's cameras either use 7-bit ASCII (I haven't checked this), use a different character set that displays Hex A9 as a different character or more likely, only use/display a subset of the 7 or 8-bit ASCII character set. If I've counted correctly, the D300 lets you choose from only 84 characters, which is even less than 7-bit ASCII minus the control characters. I suppose Nikon has a reason for limiting its camera's character sets other than just taking a conservative approach. Perhaps it's to maintain compatibility with some very old software?
 
A byte has 8 bits. Meaning 8 0's and/or 1's. A permutation of 256.
Thus in 8-bit, it can address 256 characters.
I'm not sure, maybe the © symbol is not it in the first 256.

Nikon can of course do a double-byte, at a cost. It will consume valuable memory space in the camera just to add that single character.

I'd rather use that space for my buffer, as there are several ways to add that symbol once the image is in the computer.

It can be argued that Nikon can add more in-camera storage space. But still, I'd rather use that space for my buffer.
Mr Fartleberry said:
Look at my posts from 5 years ago.

Nikon eventually admitted it's due to a double bit requirement on
some standard character set.

Smart people eh? Making 10,000 dollar professional cameras that can't
generate copyright on files. But you do get three styles of
mathematical brackets should you ever need then.
--
All I can afford is a (old) half-frame from Thailand.
Click to expand...
--
just me :)
Teddy
 
Simon Garrett said:
Thom Hogan said:
(c) is not a legal form of Copyright in the US, so intent is all you
would be getting. The approved notices are the symbol, "Copyright",
or "Copr."
Click to expand...
That's interesting. I'm pretty sure that in the UK you don't have to
claim or assert copyright - it's just there on any work you produce.
Click to expand...
You're speaking about the Berne Convention.
Simon Garrett said:
So adding "Copyright", ©, (c) or whatever makes no difference to the
status of the work; it's just a reminder to anyone seeing it.
Are you saying that in the US without ©, "Copyright" or "Copr." then
you may not have copyright protection?
Click to expand...
No, a "constructive copyright notice" is to avoid the defense in court of "innocent infringement" .
 
Thinking about it more, the standard ASCII character is up to 127 only (using 7 of the 8 bits).

The problem is, the extended ASCII (128 to 256) has several flavors. Depending on the translator, an A9 can mean different things.

--
just me :)
Teddy
 
Teddy said:
Thinking about it more, the standard ASCII character is up to 127
only (using 7 of the 8 bits).
Click to expand...
Except for when simple text editors use the "null" byte for their own purposes. Sometimes isolated <CR> or <LF> characters are expanded into a double <CRLF> pair.
Teddy said:
The problem is, the extended ASCII (128 to 256) has several flavors.
Depending on the translator, an A9 can mean different things.
Click to expand...
It's been that way since either the dawn of time or the dawn of EBCDIC, and that didn't stop editors and word processors from permitting the use of copyright and other odd characters before Unicode hit the scene. As I said, the '©' character used here seems to be a single 8-bit ASCII character, and while it may be recognized differently by different browsers running under any number of OSs, it's standard enough to be recognized as the copyright character most of the time. If it was displayed as a copyright character in Nikon's LCD displays, I'm sure that within short order all photo editors and EXIF and IPTC viewers/editors would recognize it properly. That said, you may be right, that the possibility of Hex A9 being misinterpreted may be why Nikon chose not to deal with these 8-bit ASCII characters.
 
Teddy said:
A byte has 8 bits. Meaning 8 0's and/or 1's. A permutation of 256.
Thus in 8-bit, it can address 256 characters.
I'm not sure, maybe the © symbol is not it in the first 256.

Nikon can of course do a double-byte, at a cost. It will consume
valuable memory space in the camera just to add that single character.

I'd rather use that space for my buffer, as there are several ways to
add that symbol once the image is in the computer.

It can be argued that Nikon can add more in-camera storage space.
But still, I'd rather use that space for my buffer.
Click to expand...
Valuable memory space? You could justify that back when image files were small enough that some cameras transferred them using serial cables. Most of my D300's image files range from 5MB to more than 20MB, and whether all of the ASCII data was stripped or more was added due to using Unicode, the number of images the buffer could hold would probably be the same, most of the time.

There's also no need for the copyright comment to ever be stored in the camera's image buffer. It's the same for all images and could (should) be merged with the image data when it's/they're being flushed from the buffer to the memory card.
 
Thom.
Thom Hogan said:
Nikon only uses ASCII 8-bit characters in the firmware of their
cameras at present, thus the Copyright symbol is not available.
Click to expand...
As others have pointed out, the Exif specification (derived from TIFF) calls for 7-bit ASCII characters.
So Nikon has no choice if they are going to comply with the spec.

What we would really like is the ability to set the Exif UserComment field.
The spec allows that field to be Unicode (or JIS or ASCII)

Regards,
Bill (visit me at http://home.comcast.net/~NikonD70/ )
 
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