H-metro resolves to protect content by converting text to images: this is why it won’t work – Technology Zimbabwe

Desperate situations do call for desperate measures I agree, but sometimes desperate measures can really prove to be futile. So is the case with H-Metro. H-Metro has been employing numerous tactics of trying to combat piracy and the most recent one is uploading content as images rather than text. I know the issue of piracy is a big problem in this industry and there hasnt been any viable breakthrough that I know of yet, but this resolution actually presents more problems than it solves anything. Lets go through why

So for starters, the idea is bad in that it will not help their SEO since images cannot be read by the Google search crawler and therefore, Google wont know that they have the content.

With everyone getting their news online, its great that H-Metro is online, however presenting their news as images defeats the purpose. Im saying this because for a while H-Metro wasnt actually online, forthis same issue of piracy. Them making a decision to come online is therefore positive. They just need to do it the right way.

Fine, say H-Metro doesnt really mind not having a good onlinepresence, all they want is their content protected but thats still problematic because of the existence of software such as Optical Character Recognition (OCR). OCR software recognises the text on images and PDFs which can then be extracted and converted into editableWord, Excel and Text output formats. And at the end of the day, you realise you really havent done much to address the problem.

Again, this piracy problem has driven H-Metro to upload their content later in the day after most media houses have alreadypublished. But then again, that still is a problem because some online news platforms likeiHarareandNehanda Radio(which basically steals news fromother sites and then protects it the irony!)actually manage to upload H-Metros content before H-Metro itself can.

How? The simplest assumption wed rather go with is that the content thieves buy the H-Metro hardcopy and transfer (by scanning and converting to text) the information contained onto their sites. And of course there was no way H-metro cangamble by delaying their hardcopy too I mean who buys newspaper in the evening??

Anyway, using this logic, youll discover that the new strategy of converting text to images does not help the case since content thieves still have access to the hardcopy.

So in essence: H-Metros new resolutionwill only lead to more frustration and complications rather than solve the initial problem.