With so many people having portraits taken this time of year between seniors and weddings, I wanted to touch base on something that effects everyone involved. That is photos and copyrights. I know many of my customers will scan my photos to put on their myspace and such. This is fine by me and I would love it if they made a little notation about where the portraits were taken. But this doesn't always happen, which is fine too. But one thing that really hurts us photographers is when our images are scanned or pulled from websites and printed without our permission. Not only does this hurt our business, it is illegal. It is called copyright infringement.
A copyright gives the creator of an image full rights to the image they create, including monetary compensation (every image that I use on my studio website is only used with permission by the subject). The cost of infringing on a copyright can be astronomical. Below is a link providing information on what is and is not acceptable concerning images.
http://www.pdimages.com/law/10.html-ssi
You must also be careful of images that have been taken as far back as the early 1900's. Most photo kiosks (Walmart, CVS, Ritz, etc) will not print anything that looks remotely professional. And in most cases will require you to locate the orininal photographer or their descendants before you can make copies of an image! My mother in law had this problem with a picture from her parents' wedding day that was taken in front of the courthouse where they were wed!
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Photography and Copyrights...
Posted by Angie at 11:01 AM
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3 comments:
True.
That is why I do not want to put photographs on website.
But I wish to know is there any website for photograph contest?
You can put photos on your website with enough information on them so that the person wanting to copy them would have to destroy the picture in order to use it. There is no real problem if you want to prevent problems.
Your link doesn't work but takes people to the page source of your blog. I don't know what that is all about.
The best place to put your copyright notice is right through the faces of the people you photograph instead of down in one corner. If you are trying to show what you can do, that will still work.
Then have people send you an email if they want to see more.
You can then choose to show them or not and in that way you decide who sees your portraits.
If you have a photo editing program you can also add a ghost image on your pictures that cannot be removed so that would prevent unauthorized use of what you do.
Abraham Lincoln
—Brookville Daily Photo.
Thank you Mr. Lincoln. If anyone else is having a problem with my link, please do inform me. The link on my computer takes me straight to the intended page. This entry was simply to help my customers, and those who are not, but read my blog anyways, understand copyrights and the laws governing them.
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