I want to copyright a photo I took at an event and sent to friends by e-mail. One friend has taken this photo without my permission and is making 1,000 copies for distribution at a gathering. Please advise me about copyright laws and if I can get this photo copyrighted before it is distributed.
A. The boom in digital photography and the ease of copying photos as files and sending them helter-skelter over the Internet generates renewed interest in the arcane procedure known as copyright, as your situation illustrates.
Lawyers like to pick bones, and the first thing you’ll be told is that you already own the copyright to original work as soon as it is completed. Registering a copyright with the U.S. government affirms that you are the creator, and the registration could be used in a lawsuit to get your friend to stop passing the photo around or to pay a fee.
The basics are that you need to fill out a Form VA (Visual Arts) for the U.S. Copyright Office and send it, along with a $30 filing fee, to Washington. The form is available as an Adobe Acrobat file at www.copyright.gov/forms/formvai.pdf, and there are complete instructions for what information to furnish. Also in the envelope must be a copy of the photograph.
You will find that the government stopped requiring a copyrighted work to contain the “Copyright by…” mark in 1989, so there is no need to add a notice to the picture. Experts recommend, however, that photographers add a small notice to each image to give them proof that somebody took a work while knowing that it was somebody else’s copyright.
At $30 a pop, registering copyrights for each image one snaps is out of the question; so unless you think you’ve got next year’s Pulitzer Prize photo on your computer, the cost and bother aren’t worth it until after a dispute arises.
A lot of writers and photo pros put copies of their masterpieces in an envelope, seal it and then mail it to themselves and keep it unopened in hopes that this will be dated evidence that they created it, should a dispute arise.
The Copyright Office website includes specifics for all kinds of material, such as unpublished books, published works, photos, statues, holograms and more.
While the website (www.copyright.gov) makes it all seem pretty simple, you will learn that things get horribly complex as soon as a dispute arises.
