Page 30 - Unlikely Stories 2

VERONICA

“Hard to say, I’d guess, without experts in the witness box.”
“Right. But now we have a way of proving ownership with the
push of a button: VERONICA. It involves a proprietary graphical
encryption algorithm. Don’t let the term put you off, Sir Payne. The
software package called VERONICA has two primary components,
working together to protect the interests of the museum using it.
First, the original painting is scanned at an incredibly fine level of
detail; approximately one gigabyte of storage is required to retain the
information in one square centimeter. This produces what we call the
true copy, with a resolution far beyond any individual unit application
of paint, yielding digitized boundaries virtually asymptotic to analog.
Again, all that this means is that we have created and saved a baseline
image virtually identical to the original; no copy will ever be made
which is as detailed, because VERONICA does something else
before the owner releases the image for distribution, and that is the
encryption.”
“Encryption? Sounds like the code-breakers in Whitehall back in
the last war.”
“Somewhat the same idea, but more sophisticated. The highest-
resolution image is transformed into a slightly lower one by
VERONICA while simultaneously applying a formula to the data
which imprints it with an undetectable pattern. That is, the second-
generation image is still far finer than any feasible means of
reproduction can handle, but it has been altered in a way which
makes it traceable in any subsequent generation. The copyright
holder now has protection embedded in the product; no one copying
it—or a copy of a copy of it—will be able to erase that hidden
pattern; it only disappears, as it were, at such a gross level of
resolution that the image is unusable, anyway. This is the second
function of VERONICA: it can check any digitized image, regardless
of intermediate alterations, and determine its origin. It can further
check the authorization, or license to reproduce the image. The
client, in this case the National Museum of Art, can use this
validation as an audit, or as a billing tool, or, if necessary, to initiate
legal action. All automatically, you understand; we only need to
engage a checking service to submit random usages of our images to
the VERONICA data center.”
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