Last week, the New Yorker published an article entitled “Taking Pictures: A Way for Photographers to Protect Their Work”. It chronicles the methods that one particular photographer, Yunghi Kim, protects her work. She uses a variety of techniques that would be helpful to any professional photographer who seeks to prevent the widespread duplication and circulation of their work. Here is a little more information on what any photographer can do to protect their work.
Photographers make a living by making images. To the extent that the Internet makes copying and distributing images easy, people will copy and distribute images easily, regardless of the photographer’s intellectual property rights. Below is a list of things that will help photographers keep a handle on how their work is used:
- Register Your Copyrights. I am zealous about this. Registering your copyrights allows you to more easily go after infringers as the threat of litigation is higher and you don’t need to prove damages. Because of that, you will put yourself in a better position to enforce your rights should the need arise.
- Take Your Rights Seriously. This is hard, especially for new photographers. Remember that they are your images and you own them. They are your livelihood and when someone uses them without paying for them, they are decreasing your chances of creating and maintaining a successful enterprise.
- Demand License Payments. If you do find someone using your imagery, don’t be afraid to demand a license payment. Ms. Kim – the photographer featured in the New Yorker article – apparently demands and receives settlements of a few thousand dollars from each infringer. This is neither unusual or unwarranted. An attorney can be helpful in setting and receiving the proper payment, or at least developing a general strategy for doing so. Companies like Getty Images have (for better or worse) built vast photographic empires by vigorously enforcing their copyrights. Any photographer can do the same.
- Make the DMCA Work For You. You can send out DMCA notices (note that there is a specific form that these notices must take) to sites hosting infringing images. If your notice is legitimate, the hosting site will have an incentive to take the images down: they don’t want to be included in the case as a contributory infringer.
The whole goal with all of the above is to have a set of registered images (and you can register a bunch of images as a collection, making the fees manageable) that you can protect and enforce. It may seem overbearing at first, but the alternative is to allow your images to be used freely with no compensation to you. Note that you can still offer your images for free under a Creative Commons license, but if your goal is to make a living, licensing will be a big part of that.
Are you a photographer who wants to know more about how to protect your rights? Protecting your creative work by thinking ahead. The Creators’ Legal Program gives you the tools to proactively protect your creative work.
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