ASMP’s Copyright Application Tutorial
Your original images are your legacy. Like many a photographer, you probably expect to retire on the royalties from the photographs you have made over the years. Early planning, especially with proper copyright protection, can facilitate this. Although every original photograph you create is automatically copyrighted the instant the shutter is clicked, you don’t get much legal protection unless you follow through on a few things.
So it is important for you to develop an easy system that will allow you to quickly and regularly register your copyrights as soon as possible. In this ASMP Tutorial on copyright, we explain the necessary steps to take and the problems that you should avoid.
You already own it. In most cases, unless you specifically signed away your rights, you — the photographer — own the copyright and the right to license and re-license the image in any way you choose. This is true even if you have not registered your copyright or put your copyright notice on the image. Where registration makes a real difference is when something has gone wrong and your rights are being infringed.
Proper copyright registration of your work establishes a public record of your copyright claim.
You cannot start a valid lawsuit until after you have registered the copyright to an image; therefore it makes sense to register the copyright to your images before they are published.
Your first step in this tutorial is to determine if you can register the copyrights to your image. Assuming the answer is Yes, the second step is to decide which form to use, based on whether your image has already been published. The third step is to choose a format that will satisfy the deposit requirements for your images.
Now, as a practical matter, you will often complete a shoot in which only a fraction of the images captured get published (at least, in the near term). There are two ways to handle this. One is to wait, then separate out the published selects from the unpublished out-takes and register them as two separate submissions. The other is to file immediately, group-registering all the images as unpublished without waiting to see which ones are selected for publication. Either approach can work for you, but we expect the latter approach will prove easier to manage.
Please read the tutorial through to the end. Then, after you have learned about registering your copyright, please check out our “Licensing your Images” page to learn how to earn a living off of your photos.