One way to protect an image is to put a watermark on it, as local photographer Steve Hankins does with his work.ART PROTECTIONThere are several websites — copyright.gov, computerhope.com, photoattorney.com — that offer tips on ways to protect your images. Among the most common are:• Register your copyrights to your photos. Artists serious about protecting an image should also consider registering it with the copyright office for $35, Corcoran said. If a work is registered within three months of release to the public or prior to infringement, artists may recoup up to $100,000, plus attorney’s fees. Without either a watermark-tampering claim or registration, artists can collect only the money they actually lost due to the infringement, which may not amount to much.• Put a copyright notice on or near the online images.• Make it hard for people to grab your images by doing things like disabling the user’s ability to right-click on it.• Make sure you are not giving up your rights to the image when you post it somewhere else.• Prosecute violators.
For photographers like Steve Hankins, the good news is that Internet has opened up a whole new way to let people know about his work.
The bad news is that the Internet has opened up a whole new way for people to steal his work.
“Years ago, when there was not so much photography available to people, you could make a good living off of [selling] stock photography,” he says.
Hankins shoots weddings, portraits and landscapes. Thanks to the Internet, if someone wants to include a waterfall on their web page or blog, they turn to sites like Hankins’ and just do a screen grab, where they copy — or grab — his image and paste it onto their website. And they do it without paying or giving him credit for it.