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Written by : Mary Elsey |
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now let's get into something that photographers talk about all the time but oftentimes do nothing about copywriting your work everyone is talking about who owns this and I have my rights and people might have taken this from me you can clear all of that up by copywriting your work with the Library of Congress now what is copyright copyright is your ownership of the imagery that you make when is an image copyrighted from the moment you take it but what I think a lot of photographers would be shocked to know that even though you have the copyright because you were the image creator that does not afford you the legal benefits of statutory damages and legal fees from someone who you try to go after if they stole your image now by stealing your image that's called an infringement infringement really is when someone uses your image without your authorization now there's two different kinds of infringement there is innocent infringement and there is willful now if you copyright your work the courts have already put together statutes of how much money you can get willful caps out of a hundred and fifty thousand dollars of damages per image a regular infringement only goes up to thirty thousand now how do you prove if something is a willful copyright infringement the best way starts with you to tag your imagery as copyrighted how can you put a copyright on your work you can put it up in your image title you can put it into your cameras almost every one of the cameras now you can put in ownership information as well as every image editing software has this capability Photoshop Lightroom capture one I'm not going to tell you which software you need to use because all of them offer it I have a batch option to put copyrighted notice on every single one of my images as I'm ingesting them and as I'm renaming them but the most important thing is to actually put in metadata attach it to each of your images someone can claim innocence saying I didn't know that it was copyrighted there was no way for me to know so if you put the copyright information in the title of the image or in the metadata it makes it much more difficult for them to claim innocence so you found someone who has infringe upon your work and you're the copyright owner because you took the picture but you've never registered it with the Library of Congress where does this leave you let's say you have an image of a girl walking down the beach holding the hand of a child that image is then taken from the internet and used for a resort now the onus is on you to determine how much money has that resort made directly from that image how much money have you lost based on them using that image and has it devalued the image at all so determining those three things is a very complicated mess and especially on the side that you have to find out how much they made directly from that image what do you do reach out to the same resort who infringed upon you who you're saying you want money from to say I need all your data saying how many times did someone click on that page did anyone ever click on that image how much money directly resulted in someone paying you to book a room at that resort how much money did you make from the alcohol sales from those people you understand that it's a rabbit hole one thing to another to another to another and each time your lawyer has to request from their lawyers to get that information this can drag out months years and all of a sudden your lawyer fees are astronomical and you are fighting a resort a corporation who has a lawyer on retainer the second part you have to prove how much value it is to you and if you haven't sold images for stock or resold images and you just put it up on your Flickr page you don't necessarily have a quantifiable dollar amount of how much that image is used myself I have resold images so what I have used in infringement cases is previous sales of images of that image or similar images and how much people tend to pay me for those licenses that helps establish my value third you have to quantify the damages to your business that they stole this image and how it hurts you the image can be used for something to associate it with a brand or a culture that you don't want it associate it with it could become a mean it could go viral and your image will never have a commercial value again because anyone who ever thinks about it thinks about that mean how do you quantify that how do you put a dollar amount on that it's really difficult so the simple solution to all of this it's if you copyright your image with the Library of Congress you are afforded legal leverages and legal rights that solve all of the things we just talked about let's talk about the benefits you copyright an image with the Library of Congress and you do so before any infringement or 90 days after that infringement has happened and you will be afforded the legal rights of the US copyright law what are these rights what are these benefits first you don't need to establish the value of your image or the value that they receive from using that image it's gone to statutory damages which means a judge issues a statutory fee based on the fees that you asked for in your lawsuit and that is what is awarded and that is what they are liable for what are those fees look like it's up to a judge to award those reasonable fees to you based on what you had asked for in the lawsuit statutory damages on non willful infringement go from seven hundred and fifty dollars to thirty thousand dollars that cap at thirty thousand for non willful infringement now if they willingly infringed on your work which again as long as you've made it abundantly clear on your imagery that it is copyrighted that is a willful infringement or indication of willful infringement that can go up to one hundred and fifty thousand dollars that's where it caps out so how do you say well they willfully infringed it if you go and find the image they have on their site and it has no metadata any longer embedded into it you can make the claim that they strip the metadata from it before they put it up on their site if there's a watermark that they cropped out or removed or if they took and change the name to get rid of the copyright notice in the title they have willfully infringed on your work this is a goldmine most photographers are afraid to put work out in a bunch of different avenues because they're afraid people are gonna steal it and reuse it and they're losing money and losing business if you copyright your work in a timely fashion before you publish it on any websites including your website Flickr anywhere that you may post an image you have the right now to go collect money from people and this is a legit revenue stream for a photographer another huge benefit of regice during your work with the Library of Congress is that you have the right to get your legal fees compensated by the person who stolen infringed upon your work on the flipside if you have not copyrighted your work with the Library of Congress you have to cover the legal fees that draw out from trying to figure out the value that really is the cumbers
Thanks for your comment Bari Jabali, have a nice day.
- Mary Elsey, Staff Member
hello photographers my name is Spiro Cindy Alice and this is where I answer your photography questions and we learn about photography together it is Wednesday and our first question this week comes from Barbour Olivieri who was watching the video where I was talking about working for free and I talked about copyright in that video and she says speaking of licensing and copyrights how does a person go about copyrighting his or her work and is it recommended that you do so is there paperwork to files fees to pays she's wondering how this all works so first of all the baseline copyright that exists in the United States is that when you create something whether it be a photographic image or you write a poem or you make a song or whatever it is when you create that thing you'll automatically have and own the copyright to that thing you created that's just the standard law that's out there now despite the fact that that copyright exists it is a good idea to actually register your copyright with the Copyright Office so now what I'm about to talk about here is how it works in the United States and your country if you're in a different country whether it be the UK or Canada or Australia or India or someplace else your copyright laws are going to be different from the laws and the registration processes are going to be different from what we have here in the United States and I obviously can't speak to all these different countries but here in the United States you can register at the electronic Copyright Office and it's pretty straightforward now I stay it's pretty straightforward but this is a government website which means it looks like and works kind of like a website from the 1990s but that being said it's still relatively painless to do first you register your account with the electronic Copyright Office and once you do that you can easily go through the process of registering a copyright now here's the thing you have to pay a fee to register but you don't have to register each item individually but you cannot register already published images with unpublished images so if you are deciding I'm going to copyright all of my work what you need to do is look at any image that has ever been published that means published anywhere on any website online published in any public publication that other people could see or published in any other public way those images can be all registered together but they cannot be mixed with any unpublished images that you want to register so you need to keep those segregated but once you do you say you want to register things in a group and then you pay the fee and the fee is thirty five to fifty five dollars so it's not terribly expensive and then you fill out the form and then you upload the images when you upload the images you basically need to upload thumbnails so we're talking about JPEG images 600 pixels on the longest edge and if your bulk uploading you actually need to create a zip file and then upload that zip file to the copyright offices website and once you do that it's done there's a time period of processing but you have your copyright registered and now if something happens and you need legal recourse you can use this registration in your favor and that legal recourse is the reason that it is important to actually register the copyright for your work because if somebody comes along and steals one of your images you have to prove copyright if you sue or you try to pursue some sort of legal recourse with the person who stole your images and in order to prove your copyright if you have it registered boom you've got instant proof you don't really need to do any extra work to prove that you own the image because you have the copyright registration if you don't have the copyright registration you have to prove copyright which means you have to prove origin of the image file you have to prove first rights of publication and all of these other sorts of things and even if you do prove your copyright in court not having it registered will greatly reduce the monetary compensation you might receive from any legal action that you bring against an offender so for that reason it really is important to register your images with the Copyright Office and it doesn't have to cost you a lot of money you can bulk register them and you can have these records to protect you if something happens hopefully nothing does but I think in the world we live in it's pretty safe to say that the chances are higher that it will happen than that it will not happen alright guys I hope you enjoyed this answer to Barbara's question if you have questions for me leave them down in the comments and then do me a favor would you like this video and subscribe to my channel if you really like this video maybe share with your friends the most important thing you need to do is get out there take some damn photos and then copy write those photos I'll see you guys tomorrow that you have created
Thanks Clarence your participation is very much appreciated
- Mary Elsey
About the author
I've studied social change at Saint Anthony College of Nursing in Rockford and I am an expert in philosophy of chemistry. I usually feel energetic. My previous job was funds development administrator I held this position for 6 years, I love talking about jewelry making and fly tying. Huge fan of EXO I practice racquetball and collect seashells.
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