Suwanee Dawn
The DMCA
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) has certainly received a well deserved bad reputation. This comes from the ham handed use of it by Hollywood and the Recording Companies to persecute people for fairly minor transgressions. But certain aspects of it can help the photographer.
Photographers can use the DMCA in two ways to protect our images:
- First we should mark our work with a copyright notice either as a watermark, or as I do down in the frame of the image. That frame in my case is part of the image when it is posted on the web. For other reasons you should always mark the image with a way to contact you beside the copyright statement. I use one of my email addresses. This should be an email address that you are sure will be around for a long time since it would be difficult to go back and change hundreds of email addresses embedded in photos online.
- The second important use is the DMCA take-down notice which is what you would send to a website administrator when you find your work on their site without your permission. Site owners are mostly immune to copyright infringement suits if the work was placed on their site by one of their users without the owners direct knowledge. If, that is, they promptly respond to DCMA take-down notices. That is the reason why they act when they receive a notice without asking the user to explain or defend their use of the image. They do not want to endanger that immunity defense if it comes to that.
Carol Wright the author of the PhotoAttorney Blog has some details on the legal end of these issues:
If you use a blog reader I would certainly add the PhotoAttorney blog to your reading list.
Practicalities
Now the important thing to notice about that first link, is that the problem I mentioned in the first article on this subject, the limited amount of money you can recover from infringements, is dealt with of by the DMCA. If you mark your images with a explicit copyright notice, and someone removes that notice, then they can be liable to pay attorney fees (makes those lawyer happy and willing to work for you) and from $2500 to $25000 per violation, no matter what your damages may be. This will be up to a judge.
So adding a copyright notice costs nothing to do, and may end up getting you a nice chunk of change. I dislike watermarks posted on the image but I have to admit that they are probably more effective. Just keep them small and tasteful if you do use them, please. After all we post our work online for people to admire, and a giant watermark ruins that experience. Jim Goldstein has some thoughts about using watermarks.
Take down notices do not have to be elaborate, a simple notice that informs the owner or service provider of the website about a violation is all that is needed. Something like this:
Dear Sir:
I have noticed on (date here) that your site (or insert whatever the publication is) at (insert link/URL) and dated (insert date of publication here) includes a copy of my work: (describe the work or image) that I own the exclusive rights to and infringes my rights under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the Copyright Act. This was posted by: (name and other info about the person who posted the material if known). This work originally was published (insert the link/URL to the image). I have not authorized the use of this material.
Please contact me immediately.
Sincerely,
Your name and contact information.
Again let me insert the I am not a lawyer boilerplate. So take this info’s value for what you paid for it.
The next article will be on how to formally register your work with the US Copyright Office. that also adds a lot of protection, but isn’t free nor so simple to do as the above.