Week 5 EOC: Copyright Process for Photographers

For photographers there are a few different ways that you can copyright you work and protect your work from infringers.

As we all know the ownership of your work starts from the point of creation. As soon as you create that peice of work it is yours, but you do need to back it up.

The easiest way to make a simple copyright is to put it into the metadata. For example, on one of my photographs I will include the text "Copyright Rachel Louise Carter 2011. " I would be able to put "Copyright Rachel Louise Photography," if that business name is registered and I have a legitimit business license. If you do not, then your name will suffice.

Another way to copyright your work, is something I really never thought of but discovered is to write about how you created the work. You can see on all of my posted images that I described how I created the photograph. Whether it is the settings I used, or how I incorporated the lighting in different settings, is does verify that I knew exactly how to create that photograph. A description for your photographs will be very helpful in identifying who created the work.

When you want to get really fancy, you can actually register your work to be copyrighted. Now, you may not want to actually copyright every single photograph you take because it does cost money. But you certainly would want to copyright those images that are your star images. If it is something you know people would want to steal because it is an amazing peice of work, then I would definitely get it copyrighted.