Copyrighting Your Digital Images

By David Em

March 1, 2004

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A few weeks ago I copyrighted a couple hundred digital images and photographs. I'd been putting the job off for months because the last time I time I went through the exercise it took me over two weeks to pull everything together.

That was a few years ago. Back then the job entailed first gathering together dozens of books, magazines, posters, and other media my work had been published in, then producing 35 mm film slides of hundreds of unpublished works, and finally filling out dozens of forms by hand. Thanks to digital technology and some enlightened tweaks to the copyright law, that process has been considerably streamlined.

Giving Credit Where It's Due

I've learned the hard way it's important to copyright your work. Over the years I've found dozens of unauthorized copies of my images in books and magazines. One appeared on the cover of a German sci-fi book credited to someone I'd never heard of. Another time I found one of my pictures meticulously reproduced by another artist in a commercial gallery.

It used to be that out-and-out cases of theft like these of could result in your image falling into the public domain if it wasn't properly copyrighted, potentially resulting in your losing the rights to your own work. Fortunately, recent changes in the international copyright law protect the rights of image creators such as photographers, artists, designers, filmmakers, and even web bloggers, more securely than in the past.

It's All Yours

Today's copyright law aggressively protects the rights of image creators. Now your legal ownership of an image begins the instant your original work is "fixed in a tangible form," which in the case of a digital image can mean saving it to a disk, CD, DVD, or camera flash card.

Why bother to copyright your work at all then? There are two reasons. The first is that you must register an image before you can sue somebody for infringement. The second is that when you copyright an image in advance or within 90 days of the infringement, you can not only sue the infringer for damages, you can also recover your legal costs, which can amount to considerably more than the actual damages.

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