Making Copyright Part of Your Workflow
[by Jim Cavanaugh]
Photographers often cite one of the barriers to regular copyright registration is assembling the submission of images. In the old film days, it was a significant challenge to get physical copies of all your work in an acceptable form for registration.
In today’s digital world it is much easier to assemble a registration, especially if you’re taking advantage of the Copyright Office’s electronic registration or eCO. All that is required for the majority of submissions is a small j-peg copy of each image you would like to register.
Creating these j-peg images as part of your regular assignment workflow will make timely registration much easier. Most Image processing software’s common automation features can be used on large numbers of RAW files or other formats to create the smaller j-peg files.
Here is what I do. On each assignment, I create a web gallery for my clients to review using Adobe Bridge CS4. This web gallery is created from the edited raw files that have had global color and exposure corrections made. Once the gallery is created, I simply copy the j-peg files from the web gallery folder (Resourcses-Images-Large) into my copyright registration folder. At the end of each month, I register all of the images in the copyright folder.
A special note, creating the flash based web galleries in Bridge CS4 deletes all metadata from the j-peg files. I have a copyright registration metadata template with my contact and copyright information that I apply to all of the images.
4 Responses to 'Making Copyright Part of Your Workflow'
Subscribe to comments with RSS or TrackBack to 'Making Copyright Part of Your Workflow'.
Do you register as published or unpublished?
Mark,
Since I register every month, I register as unpublished. My clients don’t have fast publication cycles.
I also use the eCO electronic registration. At this time you can not use eCO for group registrations of published images. The Copyright Office tells ASMP that this should change “soon”.
what impact on copyright if images are registered as published??
David Saffir
David,
No impact on copyright when registering a published image.
Copyright law does treat registered and unregistered images differently in terms of registration procedures and in some remedies available in an infringement based on when the image was registered.
If you register an image as published, you are eligible for punitive damages and legal costs if the image is registered before the infringement takes place or within 90 days of first publication. If registration takes place after an infringement takes place and after 90 days, remedies are limited.
Registration of unpublished images offers the same remedies of punitive damages and legal costs
Unfortunately, group registration of published images have some limitations and you can not currently do a group registration of published images using the electronic registration system.
For more information visit: http://asmp.org/tutorials/copyright-overview.html