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| *SoulEyes Photography>>>Professional Photographer |
Copyrighting photographs? |
It has been suggested over and over to consider getting my photographs copyrighted. I am not a professional photographer (although I do hope to be one day)... I have displayed some of my best work on flickr (which has found a home on their explore and is also well liked by a lot of other flickr members)... Nevertheless, I have found some korean websites on google that are using my photos as wallpapers!! would appreciate any knowledge anyone has regarding copyrighting. and just in case it matters, I live in Canada... thank you! Here is a web site at the Canadian Intellectual Property Office, which has lots of info: http://strategis.ic.gc.ca/sc_mrksv/cipo/... Basically, register your photos so your copyright is protected and you can recover punitive damages and legal costs if someone steals your photos. The next best thing is to use software such as Adobe ImageReady (or Photoshop, which is harder but will do) to reduce the color palette and resolution so that the photos look OK on the web but print and scale poorly because of the limited number of colors and limited resolution. This makes your photos less attractive to someone looking to steal images. As for preventing copying in the first place, you can't. I can easily get past any 'right click' protection I have ever seen. (Not that I would, I'm a photographer and also concerned about image theft, that's why I check to see if protection actually works.) If it displays, I and nearly anyone else can grab it. Source(s): Camera Club Educational Coordinator Professional Photographer Photography Workshop Leader in the US, a person's own work is automatically copyrighted. i am a photographer as well. you can put a copyright symbol + your name in one corner (lightly, watermarked), and they can't take them without asking permission and giving you credit. good luck! The producer of the image owns the copyright for the length of his/her life plus 75 years. Proving ownership is the problem. If you own a Nikon DSLR, then you can put your copyright notice in the Image Comment feature of the camera and every image you take will have the coment embedded in the image information. If you do not own a Nikon, then using Photoshop, you can go into the Image Information of each shot and add the copyright information there. Editorial, sports and glamour photographer You're getting some bad advice and misinformation here. First, putting a copyright notice is absolutely unnecessary or we'd be telling painters and sculptors to put copyright notices on their work. I don't do it, because it damages the original work. It's a bit of legal graffiti that's absolutely unnecessary. Your work IS copyrighted simply by being created. You can follow the registration process in place in Canada which may secure you damages in case you were to sue, but merely having the copyright will allow you to pursue injunctive relief when that is possible. Injunctive relief means a court within the abuser's jurisdiction telling the copyright abuser to stop using the image. Unfortunately in this age of the "knows no borders" Internet, much abuse happens beyond your legal reach. I shoot commercially, and almost all of the abuse of my work happens where I'm unlikely to get much relief. I don't lose much sleep over it because there's no point in stressing over a situation you can't change, and besides I don't know anyone who's making a lot of money by abusing my copyright. Secondly, when fhotoace says "The producer of the image owns the copyright for the length of his/her life plus 75 years," think about that. You're dead and for 75 years you still own the photo. Fat lot of good that does you. More correctly, the ownership passes to your heirs or debtees, who may be clueless as to what to do about it. At any rate, you are dead so you don't care. Basically, if I were you, unless you're taking very valuable photos with a very high resale value, I wouldn't lose a lot of sleep about abuse unless you discover some, then consult a copyright attorney who will help you get legal relief if it's possible, which it may not be. If you'd want to be able to sue for damages (and I confess I'm unfamiliar with Canadian law), then educate yourself as to how to register your photos to the satisfaction of the Canadian copyright office. You don't need to do anything to HAVE copyright, and it's extremely unlikely you'll ever sue anyone for damages, so you might want to consider simply ignoring your ignorant friends. |
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