How to Copyright your photography with Monte Isom

Today we will discuss a very touchy topic that a lot of photographers talk about but do a little. You might hear a frequent concern from artists that their photographs or videos were used without their consent, or plagiarized on a constant basis. Monte Isom from F-Stoppers shares some tips and stories  on how he approaches the copyright case in the youtube video, as a part of their 14 hour tutorial, available at Fstoppers.com What they do not know is that you can clear all of that up by copywriting your work with the Library of Congress.

What is copyright?

Copyright is your ownership of the imagery you make. When is the image copyrighted? From the moment you take it! However, 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 spent on your defenders, if they stole your image. When someone steals the image, he/she commits an infringement, that is using the artwork without author’s authorization. There are two kinds of infringement: innocent and willful.  In any case, the court system has already designed the maximum amount you can get from winning the case, which is $150 000 per image. A regular infringement however is about $30 000.  

How to prove a willful copyright infringement?

The best way is the simplest way – tag the images you release as copyrighted. There are few ways to mark your images as copyrighted:

• You can put it in the name of the image.
• You can put the ownership information into your camera’s settings
• You can put the ownership information into your software like PS, LR, Capture1.

The most important thing is to attach metadata to each image. Otherwise someone can claim innocence saying that he didn’t know that it was copyrighted because there was no way to find out. So if you put the copyright information in the name or metadata, you will be a step ahead in your protection. Let’s look at some scenarios when the issue of copyright arrises.  

Scenario #1

You found someone who used your work but you never registered it with the library of congress. What should you do ? Let’s say your photo was used by some retail chain store. The first thing you are obliged to do is to evaluate

• how much money that store made from using your image
• how much money you lost from that use.
• how much money the photograph lost in its value after its use.

Determining these parameters might sound complicated. In fact some of it, like requesting the information about how much money was made by the store, might take months and has to be done through your lawyer. And of course the more you wait, the more you pay in legal fees. But the good news is that if you register your image with the Library of Congress before or within 90 days after the incident of infringement happened, ALL of those problems will  be covered by them and you will be afforded the legal rights of US copyright law. What are these rights:

• You do not need to establish the value that was unlawfully gained from your image.
• You do not need to establish the value that you lost from that image.

Instead the judge issues a statutory fee that is based upon the fee that you asked for and fees you have spent. The amount of it is determined by the judge. Statutory damages on a non willful infringement go from $750 to $30 000 max. For willful infringements, if your image had a  clear proof of copyright at the moment of illegal usage, the fine can go up to $150 000. But how do you prove that someone infringed on your work if they erase your metadata and name before putting it on the website? By law, the fact that they manipulated information in name and metadata de facto establishes it as an infringement.   

Scenario #2

You have a client who wants to pay for the images you are about to create for him/her. After production is over and you sent the final version the client starts procrastinating with the payment and eventually disappears completely. Heard of that story before? True story. Now, if you were to copyright the images before you send it to a client, you will be legally protected to withdraw the payment from the client, even in court if that would escalate to that. And all legal fees would be covered by Library of Congress! Beautiful, isn’t it?

The moral

If you take into habit to always copyright your images by inserting your information as the owner into its name and metadata, you should have no worry of releasing it into the web. You also should have no worry of spotting unlawful users of your work committing infringement and suing them with legal help of Library of Congress. Your lawyer’s fees would be covered by law. No estimates would be required and instead the judge will determine a statutory fee.   To register your work with the Library of Congress costs $35 for a single entity (photograph, video clip, film) and $55 for a batch (no limit in quantity). You can file your registry electronically by submitting the images online at Copyright.gov If you submit a batch and you have a lot of images of high resolution, that will take forever to upload. So resize each image to 400px wide size. That should decrease the size drastically yet still be enough to preserve the details of the artwork.   In this F-Stoppers video Monte Isom shares the story on how he won $18000 from one of photos that some journal has infringed upon. He also does a walk-through on how to submit the work to the Library of Congress. Watch the full video here: