Sorry Mr. Manufacturer - you don't own my images

Canon has gone on record that they and they alone shall know the format of the image information stored in their RAW image format and if we don't like it, we can purchase someone else's equipment.

According to a statement published in another Blog Canon officially states, "In order to maintain our leadership position, we find it necessary to protect our intellectual property. Therefore, we have decided to maintain the confidential nature of the communication protocols of our digital cameras and the documentation of our RAW image data, among other things."
As readers of my blog know, I didn't purchase my Nikon D70 until I'd found a utility that allowed me to process the raw NEF format files into images on Linux. The dcraw program does a great job but there is still one aspect of Nikon that I didn't know about - that they encrypt the white balance information and are using lawyers to disuade independent (read non-authorized and havn't signed a non-disclosure) from reverse-engineering the encryption. Fortunately, it appears that the D70, even with software updates to version 2.0, does not implement this particular "feature".

I've been a photographer since learning from my father in the late '50s. He was the school photographer at John Oliver High School on Fraser Street in Vancouver while he attended in the late '30s / early '40s and had a full darkroom in our basement.

This is just one of the reasons I've found myself involved in the copyright areas and now in the technical areas surrounding digital rights management and such. It is my firm belief that the creators of a tool have absolutely no right to restrict my use of the tool in the cration of my artistic (or technical) work, and a camera is just a tool.

I recall a period when artists learned that you could push the colors of a Polaroid image around for a while during its processing outside the camera - and seeing some astounding images from this technique. Imagine if Polaroid had said to these artists "you can't do that, that's our technology and you are not allowed to interfere with it." Well it's the same thing with the white balance information (or any information for that matter) in the RAW image format of a camera. That's my image stored in that file and I want every single bit of it under my control no matter what I want to do with it, and if you Mr. camera manufacturer don't like that, then I won't purchase your product.