(posted 3/7/97)
In Photogrphy on the Web's's first feature we discussed basic plans for this site. Another topic I consider basic, not especially interesting, but necessary, is the copyright of photographs on the Web. I am opinionated on this topic but not a lawyer so I dug around to see what lawyers say on this issue. This discussion deals with the U.S. Copyright Law. Each country has its own laws, but treaties have recently been signed attempting to define worldwide copyright standards.
The U.S. Copyright Law of 1976 makes the creator of a work, be it photography, writing, software or whatever, the owner of that work. Permission to use the work for specific purposes can be assigned but ownership remains with the creator unless he or she transfers that ownership to another party or creates the work as an employee. For many years, in most photography assignments and usages, the rights were implied in the nature of the assignment. If you were assigned to illustrate a magazine article it was implied that the only use of that picture was for that article.
In recent years people generally have become more aware of intellectual property and the ownership of copyright has become a bigger issue. For example, my son was taught to put copyright symbols on his artwork in grade school. Because of this new awareness photographers have needed to educate themselves on the law. I believe this new emphasis on Copyright Law is in part a result of copyright being news because of recent mergers of communication companies, international trade negotiations concerning intellectual property, and the proliferation of new media, including the Web.
The Web is somewhat unique because the origins of the Internet and the Web started in the late 1960s and the attitudes that first defined the Internet were from that period: "all information is free and meant to the shared". These attitudes can still be found on the Web and are some of its strengths, but there is a need to balance this freedom with the rights of the maker of a work to benefit from his or her creation. For example, the posting of a web page is generally covered by the doctrine of implied public access and you can link from your web page to another without problem but it is illegal to take a photograph or other content from another web page and place it on your page without the permission of the copyright owner. Does this mean I will sue a college student who uses one of my pictures on his personal web page without permission, probably not; but if it were a company, maybe.
How does a photographer protect his images on the Internet? Most photographers do not have any copyright information imbedded in their pictures and trust low image quality or resolution(72dpi) on the Web to protect their images. Some have text copyright information associated with their page. On some of my larger images I have small copyright symbols layered into the corners of photographs. Ron Vesely has visible copyright watermarks over some of his photographs. The Digimarc company has a product that imbeds invisible information into the pixels of a picture that can be viewed in an imaging program.
A neat trick to see if someone is using one of your images is to use the Altavista search engine. You enter the image file name including the extension into the search field and the results of the search are a list of where your photograph appears, hopefully only where it is supposed to be.
The World Wide Web is the life blood of the Information Age and the Copyright Law protects the makers of the information.
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Photography on the Web © 1997 Wm. Franklin McMahon |
