business: a primer on copyright and why it’s important
April 30, 2008 – 12:30 amThe role of copyright and how it works is a mystery to many photographers. I can certainly understand why, especially with communication and digital image delivery constantly evolving. I’m not an expert on copyright but would really like to share my passion and basic understanding of the subject. When it comes time to dive deeper please refer to the ASMP website and the Library of Congress Copyright Office.
What is copyright? As it pertains to photographers, it is protection afforded the creator of an original work. It verifies that you are the creator of an image and that you own all of the rights to the image.
So how do you get the copyright for an image after you’ve created it? What is the process? The good news is that you don’t have to do anything to get the copyright to your work. You own the copyright to your images the moment they are created. No one can use that image for anything other than you, unless you grant them the right to do so.
Isn’t it more complicated than that? Yes and no (this is why it is a mystery to many). You have the copyright, no problem, but there are things you should do to protect that copyright. The first thing you should do is mark your images with your copyright. The accepted manner of marking an image is:
(either the word ‘copyright’ or the copyright symbol)(the year of first publication)(your name)
So my copyright could look like either of these:
copyright 2008 Jim Talkington
© 2008 Jim Talkington
Where do I mark the image? Digital images should have copyright entered into the file’s metadata. Physical prints should have it written, stamped or affixed to the image. From 2006 - 2007 I maintained a blog of my personal images called thirtysevenseconds.com. All of the images on the site had my copyright and contact information entered into the file metadata. I also created a Photoshop action to imprint my copyright on the edge of every single photo before posting (and there were hundreds).
Okay, I’ve done all that and it didn’t seem so bad. Is that all there is to it? There is yet another layer of copyright protection available. Important images can (and should be) registered with the copyright office. By registering your copyright, there can be no dispute of who owns the image. You now have all of the legal protection afforded by law.
How do I do this and how much does it cost? The LOC did a great thing a few years ago by allowing photographers to group register images. How many images can you fit on a CD or DVD? That’s how many you can register at one time. And they can be small images, they don’t have to be full-res. They just have to be distinguishable and identifiable. Burn the disk, fill out the paper applications and send it all off to the Copyright Office with $45 and they take care of the rest. Peter Krogh, author of the highly recommended DAM (digital asset management) Book
That sounds like a lot of unnecessary hassle. My photos aren’t that valuable and, heck, I’d be flattered if somebody wanted to publish them. That would be exciting! I’m not going to mess with that copyright stuff, I’m going to let anybody use them for whatever they want. Free love and photos, baby!
Flickr gives a choice of labelling your images with copyright protection or under a creative commons license. Please choose to always copyright protect your images. Maybe when you are young and enthusiastic you may just desperately want to be published. As a professional photographer of 20+ years I won’t resort to a plea, I’ll just throw out a few examples of why copyright is valuable, things many photographers might not consider.
* What are your personal values, morals, ideologies and beliefs? What do you strongly believe in? Now what if someone took one of your free photos to illustrate, endorse or support a cause that you are morally opposed to? What is your recourse?
* Virgin Mobile in Australia created an ad campaign using Flickr photos licensed under Creative Commons. They were allowed to use the images for advertising at no charge as long as they attributed the photographer by listing their Flickr web address. A couple of things went wrong as a result:
In one ad the image of a 16 year old U.S. girl (taken and posted by a family friend) was used. Not only was she underage, not only was there no signed model release, they also used text in the ad that the family found derogatory. If the image had been labeled with copyright then at least the company would have had to ask permission in the first place. Who bears the burden of a legal mess like this? Do you have the time to sort something like that out?
In another case an image taken in a German (if I recall correctly) zoo was published in an advertisement. The photographer had posted it to his Flickr account and marked it as freely available for commercial purposes. Well, he was allowed to photograph in the zoo because he was a tourist. The zoo does not allow commercial photography to be done without permission. So now that the image has become a commercial photograph, taken without permission, whose legal responsibility is it to pay usage and any damages? Again, not something I’d want to deal with.
At least make the people wanting to publish your photos ask for permission. Some other day we’ll address the value of imagery.
Please continue reading and educating yourself to the importance of copyright. If you are interested in better understanding copyright I highly recommend the bible of the American Society of Media Photographers, the ASMP Professional Business Practices in Photography.
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6 Responses to “business: a primer on copyright and why it’s important”
There are plenty of reasons to use the CC license and not the “generic” one that landed the mess with Virgin. “Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike Creative Commons ” is a much more useful license in my opinion. I think what’s interesting is that people I know who started to shoot, before the internet are now very protective of their images. While people who have started or worked in the online world more, understand that more open licensing actually can benefit them, and rarely hurt them, if they know what they are doing. A generic CC license is probably a bad(terrible) idea, but that does not make CC a bad idea in general.
my two cents!
By ryan on Apr 30, 2008
Thanks, I’m here to learn, too. And I definitely started shooting before the internet. I’d appreciate hearing more comments on the various Creative Commons options and opinions.
I’ll be honest: we professional photographers secretly fear that copyright protection (and our livelihood) might completely go away if education isn’t done. The Orphan Works legislation in front of Congress right now could really deal a blow, stripping artists of numerous protections to our own work.
Professional photographers and artists choose copyright protection because it is written into U.S. law. We know what it is, how it works and that we are protected by the legal system in case of infringement.
I admit that I’m not totally up on Creative Commons Licensing. From my understanding, Creative Commons is a set of standards overseen by a non-profit group in Massachusetts. I honestly don’t know how the whole thing works when someone violates a license, how it is enforced, what the legal recourse is and what the precedents are. As a result, it all starts looking sort of “gray”. I just revert back to basic copyright because I understand it and know I’m protected.
But I want to be totally honest…conversely, as a blogger, putting my videos on YouTube has been a great benefit. So I’m struggling to make the right decisions in this ever-changing environment, too. Hey, provoking thought is why we’re all here in the first place.
By Jim Talkington on Apr 30, 2008
CC a license form initally developed by Lawrence Lessig, a law professor at Stanford Law School.
The basic idea is not about giving up your copyright, it is about offering a generic framework consisting of pre-designed licenses to grant _some_ rights to others.
This is important, as the Creative Commons initiative seeks to fit a similar licenses to as many legislations as possible and e.g. the German legal equivalent of the copyright, the Urheberrecht, is imprescriptible.
The slogan of CC does represet this as well: ‘Some rights reserved’.
If someone violates that license, you will have to sue that person, just as you would, if someone violated your copyright, because it is just this, what said person does then.
You could as well issue a custom license offering some kind of use of your intellectual property to others - the advantage of CC is simply that you do need to pay a lawyer to check if your terms and conditions are legal and therefore will hold a legal claim afterwards.
When I publish the one or the other piece of work on the net, I normally opt for the Attribution-NonCommerical-NoDerivedWorks-License. On the one hand, this makes sure that whoever wants to earn money with my intellectual property has to request a license matching this requirement first, so I make sure, I am _within_ the cashflow. To prohibit derived works is important to me, as I do not want to see edits of my photographic work on the net, without authorizing them. Opinions differ here, of course, and I would choose something else, if I was remixing music and publishing it.
On the other hand, it grants people the freedom to decorate their livingroom or whatever not-earning-money-with-it-location they like, with my pictures if they want to do that [1]. Or use one of my pictures to illustrate their private blog etc.
For them it is easing things as all the logistics of contacting and asking the author is not necessary. For me, this is promotion.
CreativeCommons is about Fair Use, not free-as-in-free-beer use. A great approach, I think.
[1] If I want to sell the big prints, I may just limit the quality i use for publishing, so people cannot do it for themself. At least not that good.
By foo on Apr 30, 2008
foo, you’ve described CC in a way that makes it much more understandable (at least to me), this is great information. I always create custom parameters each time a work is licensed (well, I do have software that does it for me). CC is a collection of generic licenses that the public can use at will, and the licenses are attached to copyright. Since I am primarily an assignment photographer I still see value in using custom licenses for my particular work but I see how CC can help in many cases now.
I could look this up but since some people are willing to help me out (right on!) are CC licenses granted for a specified period of time? I’ve been under the impression that any sort of contract has to have a stated time limit in order to be legally binding. Do I have this correct? Any lawyers?
By Jim Talkington on Apr 30, 2008
Hi Jim,
Well, you’ve done it again! Copyright is a minefield, and although I don’t get ALL of what you, and the others, are getting at, I at least have a bit more of what’s happening. I think it’s time that some bright spark published a site explaining all the technical terms. There is a great site available via Strobist, detailing the basic set-up of a ’serious’ flash kit, and what it does. I think seven minutes watching this video was more informative than many books I’ve read. Check it out. I,ve just stepped up to ’serious’ photography from chasing pictures, free-lance, for the local paper, and I learned a lot. So, O.K., I knew most of it, but there’s plenty I didn’t know. The same could be said of a certain video about different coloured backgrounds all done with lights, or should that be mirrors? What I think I mean, is: We all know a lot more than we think we do, it’s just a good idea to check that what we know is actually right! More power to your typing finger!
By Doug Chinn on Apr 30, 2008
As far as I know, CC licenses are not issued for a certain time. Let’s say, I publish an image on my website under a CC BY-NC-ND (attribution, non-commercial, no derived works) license: whoever downloads this image to use it under the given conditions is free to do so, as long as (s)he likes. Now, I remove the image from my website. Whoever downloaded it before, may still use it according to the license I once granted.
When you release a new/altered version, you can change the license conditions.
Generally, licenses may be issued for a limited time, but this is not mandatory for the license to be legal. When purchasing a software product, for example, you normally expect that you may use it without a time limit and that is just what you do with almost all software in the consumer market. You grant an unlimited (as far as time is concerned) license for this exact version.
For more certainty, maybe a lawyer should step in right here, as especially the US copyright laws sometimes are rather strange, or at least interpreted strangely. Mosty though for the better of the copyright holder.
By foo on May 2, 2008