How does copyright protect your photos?

You want to show your photos to the world, but the digital age makes it easier than ever for people to steal your work. How do you protect your photos?

Copyright – the law is behind you

What is copyright?

Copyright was invented to protect the creators of artistic works from their work being exploited by others. This is so that you can earn a living (if you wish) from your work. Copyright is there to prevent others from copying or reproducing your photos, displaying them in public or making derived works from them (e.g. using your photo in a collage, or making a painting from them). Most countries recognise copyright under local law in a broadly similar way.

As the original author of the work, you can assign the copyright to someone else, but this must be done in writing.

Copyright exists for 70 years after the death of the author.

It’s worth noting that if you took a photograph as part of your employment for someone else, that your employer holds the copyright to the photograph, not you.

How do I copyright my photos?

Firstly, it’s important to realise that you automatically own the copyright to every photograph you take. You don’t have to use the © symbol or watermark your images in order to have the copyright to an image. The problem comes when you get into a dispute and need to prove that you are the creator of the photo.

How do I prove that I created the photo?

You publish a photo on the internet and someone copies it and uses it for their own means. In this digital world, the copy is exactly the same as the original that you published online. How do you prove that yours is the original?

The answer could be easier than you thought. If you take your photographs using RAW format, and keep the originals, that is. Assuming you published a jpeg of your photograph, and that is what the thief has too, you can show that it could have been created from the RAW photograph (which only you have), but that the RAW photograph could not have been created from the jpeg.

Creative Commons

Creative Commons is a nonprofit corporation dedicated to making it easier for people to share and build upon the work of others, consistent with the rules of copyright.

They provide free licenses and other legal tools to mark creative work with the freedom the creator wants it to carry.

You will probably have come across Creative Commons if you use photo-sharing web sites like Flickr. The Creative Commons licenses are clearly and simply worded so that anyone should understand if and how they can use your photographs.

The license covers three areas – whether anyone using the photo must give attribution (mention you and link back), commercialization (can your image be used commercially) and derivation (can your image be used in another work). A common combination is Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works i.e. Someone may display your photo if they mention you and link back to the original image or your website, cannot use it for commercial puposes, and cannot base a new work on your photo. You can use the tools on the Creative Commons website to make a badge that summarises this, which for our example would look like this:-

This also automatically links back to the full license with a straightforward explanation.

You can access the Creative Commons licenses and tools at http://creativecommons.org/.

How do I find where my photos have been copied?

It’s very difficult to find your photographs on the internet, but not impossible. If someone has been silly enough to leave the file name the same, you can search for it using Google. Google have also launched a similar images feature in Google Images. If you can find your photograph on there, there may be a ‘Find similar images’ link under it, which will display (you’ve guessed it) similar images. Google images is at http://images.google.com.

Tin Eye is a reverse image search engine. You can upload the image you are looking for (or supply the URL of the web page where it is displayed), and it will look for similar images online. Tin Eye did a good job of identifying a test image I uploaded, but they admit that they only have a small part of the web searched at the moment. Tin Eye can be found at http://www.tineye.com/.