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If you spend anytime with a group of photographers you’re going to hear about copyright and the deplorable state of art theft on the Internet these days. The odd thing is for the hours I’ve spent reading online conversations about photogs images being stolen, I don’t think I’ve ever heard of anyone actually defending their rights other than a hastily crafted cease and desist e-mail. Guilty your Honour.

Talking about copyright while posting your work on an open forum is like throwing your sleeping bag down in the middle of a crack house and then wondering why you can’t get any rest. Don’t get me wrong, I register and do everything I can to protect my work from commercial exploitation that isn’t in my control. It isn’t copyright as such that I’m ranting about but the time and energy it takes from doing your work and the common sense people seem to abandon while expecting some protection. I’ve heard statements like: “I just uploaded all of my best shots to Flickr and I’m wondering how I can stop people from using them without my permission?” First of all when you share your work on a domain owned by someone else like Flickr or Google you’re granting them usage rights as soon as the uploads complete. They have to have usage rights to display them. It’s in the READ ME BEFORE POSTING paragraph.

As soon as you put something on the web you’ve given it away. The solution is chose carefully what you are giving. Keep all image sizes minimal to prevent? printing any larger than 6×4″. Don’t try and prevent that size because you can’t and still have a presentable image. Be willing to give away something. Next watermark your images conspicuously enough that cropping the information out would render the image inferior and not worth using. The last step is register your work with the copyright offices of your respective governments. You can easily win a copyright argument simply enough but retrieving damages is next to impossible without this last step. You can reduce each image to 400px and write them to an archival? quality DVD and send them in. At 4.7 GB you can fit thousands of images on a disc and not have to worry about it anymore.

These simple steps will save you the need and curb the urge to jump into the “What about copyright” threads. The time you save and the worry you avoid will be better spent on taking shots and post production.

Oh and the shot above of the Great Blue Heron fishing? It’s mine, you can’t have it.

The Canadian Intellectual Property Office

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