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

[JWT1947]

Firmware version 1.10 added the copyright feature but it doesn't include the symbol. If you use this feature EXIF readers that contain a COPYRIGHT field will contain whatever information you desire to input when you set the feature up in your camera. From the abridged D300 manual:

The Setup Menu
Copyright Information

A [Copyright information] option has been added to the setup menu. To enter a photographer or

copyright holder name, select [Artist] or [Copyright] and follow the instructions on page 256 of the

User’s Manual. Photographer names can be up to 36 characters long, copyright holder names up

to 54 characters long. To attach this information to all subsequent photographs, highlight [Attach

copyright information] and press 2 to place a check (M) in the box. To save changes and exit,

highlight [Done] and press J. Copyright information is displayed on the fourth shooting data page
in the photo information display.
Copyright Information

To prevent unauthorized use of the artist or copyright holder names, make sure that [Attach copyright information] is not selected and that

the [Artist] and [Copyright] fi elds are blank before lending or transferring the camera to another person. Nikon does not accept liability for

any damages or disputes arising from the use of the [Copyright information] option.
--
A photograph is a memory you can touch...

 

[Svein Skogen]

Actually this isn't a memory-space-requirement thing at all, it's a direct result of computer history.

In the beginning, we used ASCII, which handled the lower 7 bit of a byte, with characters from x00 (NUL) to 0x1f bein control characters (such as 03 being control+c etc).

This worked all nice for US standard letters. But before long people outside the US pointed out that most of the rest of the world uses characters outside the A-Z space, including accented characters.

This led to an awful mess of each computer manufacturer devising their own stuff to fill the 0x80-0xff space if the byte.

Then, along with DOS3 (iirc) IBM tried to mend the mess by introducing codepages. This helped in a lot of ways, but there were still more-than-one standard, where a Norwegian "Ø" / "ø" (o with a slash through, "oe") became either the cent, or the yen symbol (depending on upper/lower case) in the US codepage, and other mess.

Thus, we still had only the lower seven bits standardised.

I suspect that the reason the EXIF standard explicitly only permits lower 7 bit symbols, is that they have no wish to include the mess of the upper 128 values. Allowing ANY 8 bit characters here would lead to a "which standard" problem, and whatever codepage they tried, WOULD lead to some other nationality complaining "but you didn't include our national characters", etc. It's the kind of politics we can very well do without.

As for setting the copyright in-camera there is a VERY good reason to do that.

The exif metadata is added before the raw-integrity-verification code (picture authentication) is calculated, and thus can this be used to handle disputes. End of case.

Svein
--
Hi! I'm a .signature virus!
Copy me into your .signature to help me spread!

 

[azguy]

Thanks for the steps, this is something we can all do. You don't have to iinclude the symbol to claim a copyright, just provide a notice.
--
JohnE
http://www.pbase.com/jpower

 

[Billx08]

Actually this isn't a memory-space-requirement thing at all, it's a
direct result of computer history.

Yes, that's what I was arguing (about something altogether different, though) that there was no good reason to worry about "wasted" memory space.

In the beginning, we used ASCII, which handled the lower 7 bit of a
byte, with characters from x00 (NUL) to 0x1f bein control characters
(such as 03 being control+c etc).

This worked all nice for US standard letters. But before long people
outside the US pointed out that most of the rest of the world uses
characters outside the A-Z space, including accented characters.

In the beginning (mine, that is) my first printer didn't even work well for US standard letters. It was a rugged Black Box printer that lacked lower case and some other characters. But then it wasn't really an ASCII device but a small, portable teletype that used 5 - level baudot. Kinda slow, too. I recall an impressive series of three articles (Inside ASCII) written by Bob Bemer and published in Interface Age in the late 1970s. He was known as the Father of Ascii, helped create the 8-bit per byte standard and "invented" and assigned a number of characters to the ASCII set, including the Escape, Backslash and Square Bracket characters, as well as the Unit, Record, Group and File Separator characters, and probably the Curly Brace characters as well. For the curious, here are some links to interesting articles :

http://www.trailing-edge.com/~bobbemer/INSIDE-A.HTM

http://www.trailing-edge.com/~bobbemer/IBMSUIT.HTM

http://www.trailing-edge.com/~bobbemer/BRACES.HTM

an obit :
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A4138-2004Jun24.html

and a remembrance :

Bemer was the first person in the world to publish warnings about Y2K.
Computers were using two digits to indicate the calendar year when
four were needed to do that correctly.

In the February 1979 issue of Interface Age Bemer wrote:

"There are

many horror stories about programs, working for years, that died on
some significant change in the date. The program may well fail from
ambiguity in the year 2000".

But his first warning came in 1971 in an editorial he wrote for the
Honeywell Computer Journal under the heading 'What's the Date'?
That was his response to a US government ruling that two-digit
years would become the preferred option for federal agencies,
starting 1 January 1970.

Bemer fought on for change regardless. He and others mustered
the support of dozens of technical societies and appealed to US
president Nixon to declare 1970 the National Computer Year.

When lobbying, believed to be from the defence department, kept
the group out of the Oval Office, Bemer turned to presidential
science advisor, Edward David. David went to Nixon who listened
and then asked for help fixing his TV set!

. . .

As if that wasn't enough, Bemer also helped create another important
computer language standard in the late 1950s and named it Cobol
(Common business oriented language). He later satirically commented:
"Sometimes I regret creating Cobol*. It allowed lots of people that are
less competent and responsible than they should be to get into the
computer field".

• Working with Grace Hopper, of course.

http://www.ferguscassidy.ie/ethos-04-July-2004.html