Digital allows for infinite copies of images. Will future technologies allow for limiting the availability/visibility of digital files to the owners (as verified on a blockchain). This would see digital work (visual, audio, interactive, etc) not only having value, but behaving like physical art one offs or editions.
As you couldn’t expect a complete removal of images from the internet unless you were the owner of that image, perhaps low resolution or watermarked images would be served to viewers in place of the original, unwatermarked high res version (musch liek stock libraries do), unless of course you owned the rights to view the original. This could act in a similar way to DRM in audio and video files, with either a low res preview (eg itunes playing a 30 second clip of the music track) or a substitute clip/trailer in lieu of the actual film/tv programme (eg apple tv).
This raises an interesting point about how the global film and music corporations fought back against freely sharing films and music digitally (essentially software piracy, typically through napster and p2p torrents / file sharing in the late 90’s early 00’s).
The threat to their business models resulted in them developing new systems and technologies, motivated to take responsibility for ‘their’ creations – effectively owning films and music files. Images on the other hand don’t have the same lobbying corporations behind them. Maybe stock libraries such as corbis, but despite being a $Xb international industry, the art world / art sales / art publishing has not (yet) had a reason or motivation to take a DRM route, unlike film or music publishing. Likely due to there not being a threat to their revenue streams as was the case with the film and music industries. With NFT’s and the monetization and scarcity of digital artworks, there may emerge a motivation for the art world to protect digital art assets in the same vein as the film and music industry in the 2000’s.
*00110010 = 2, see https://www.morsecodeninja.com/binary.html