One of the biggest problems today’s photographer faces is copyright infringement. This can come in a few different forms, from the deliberate to the naive and accidental. This will be a two part series as it is a really big issue and photographers need to know where they stand.
Thankfully in Australia we have laws that protect our rights as photographers, and it is important that we know these rights. As soon as you have taken a photograph, you own the copyright to the image. This does however have an interesting exception. Portraits and wedding photographs are the copyright of the person who is the subject and not the photographer oddly enough.
There is no need to register your right, but it is important to make sure that you can prove that you are the owner of the copyright. The best place to start is by making sure the metadata on your images has all your details, including name, address, contact phone number and date image was created. This will help for a few reasons. One is that it will help other identify that it’s your shot and they can get in contact with you about licensing, and secondly it proves you are the copyright owner of the image. Of course unscrupulous people that know how to edit this data can simply remove it, but as a general rule of thumb… thieves are pretty dumb. Another common thing to do is to place a watermark on your image. This can be unsightly and people that are handy with photoshop can probably remove it with a bit or work, but it certainly slows them down at least. Also importantly only load up small low res versions onto the internet to reduce the quality of what they would have access to. At least they won’t be able to create good large prints of your work. Essentially though, there is no full proof way of protecting your work, but at least you can minimize the likely hood of it occurring. Making sure you have good storage, and documentation also helps in the long run, especially if you need to prove that the image is yours.
Now that we have looked at a few preventative measures that can be implemented with relative simplicity, I’ll move on to the different people that will steal your work. This falls into a few categories. Firstly we have people that will deliberately infringe your copyright and won’t care much about it. These are probably the most difficult people to deal with as they are aware of what they are doing and will usually have to be dealt with by way of threats or legal action and lots of letters going back and forth.
As I previously mentioned that it’s a very important topic for all photographers so I thought I’d break it up into two parts so that I can cover it a bit more in depth. Stay tuned for the rest of the article to be posted up tomorrow.
Achilles
