Protecting our digital assets

I'm facing a dilemma regarding using our digital assets in android, iOS, and web apps.

Several of our products use high resolution digital assets to which we are the legal copyright holder.  In some cases, we have been granted copyright ownership by the original owners, but in most cases, our digital assets are original works that we have created and which we cherish and hold dear to our hearts.

Now, why would that that cause us a dilemma?  Well, primarily because when we use one or more of these digital assets in one or more of our apps, we have the following, often conflicting goals:

• We want to use high resolution versions of our digital assets to enhance the viewer's experience, 
• We want to use a resolution which ensures that the assets are not too large, which will cause under-powered phones, tablets, and other computing devices to evoke a user experience that is sub-optimal
• We want to protect our digital assets from being "snatched and re-purposed" for use in other vendor's products or advertising or simply for people's viewing pleasure outside of our intended viewing technologies

So, say that we want to provide a display and consumption model which attempts to compromise between these goals.  What are some of our options?

• Subtly watermark the digital assets
• Include a copyright statement visibly embedded into a corner of each digital asset
• Degrade the digital asset quality so that they are not attractive enough for others to snatch
• Just say, what the heck, put our best digital assets in our products and don't worry about it
• Encrypt the digital assets so that they are not usable by asset snatchers, only decrypting each asset during the period of time that the asset is being displayed

While developing a set of apps that display a lot of digital photos, we have found that a practical size for our digital photos is about 6M bytes, either as a 2000 x 3000 or a 3000 x 2000 image.  When storing these images as Resources, that's the size goal that we shoot for.  This size allows us to show nice resolutions in our mobile apps, while not putting too much strain on the graphics systems involved.

We also support the display in our apps of user-submitted photos.  We have considered a couple of options here:

• Limit the size of the photos that the user submits to 6M bytes
• Allow the user to submit any size of image.  If the image is smaller than 6M bytes, we just use it as is.  However, if the image is larger than 6M bytes, then our code will use the android graphics engine to re-sample the images so that a standard 6M byte image is displayed.

More thoughts and fleshing-out to follow...