From: paul stenquist
On Apr 4, 2010, at 9:58 PM, Mark Roberts wrote:
John Sessoms wrote:
From: paul stenquist
That should read "I can't imagine why anyone would lose
any sleep over copyrighting itty-bitty web images.
And I can't. There are many things worthy of our concern
these days. This is not one of them.
But, in my position - hoping to transition to making an
income from photography at some future point - do you think
it's worth going ahead and backfilling the copyright into the
meta-data in my existing unpublished catalog?
Or, I guess turn the question around ... is there any reason
I shouldn't?
Nope, there's no reason why you shouldn't.
In fact, there's reason why you should: Not all images swiped
from web pages are taken in deliberate theft. Many - most, I
would wager - are taken in naive ignorance of copyright laws. The
reason for embedding copyright information isn't to prevent image
theft or to catch image thieves, it's to allow people further
down the chain who *want* to honor copyright properly )or find
the original photographer for other reasons) to contact you.
That's why I always include copyright EXIF and a visible
watermark in my photos. Not as a deterrent to thieves but as an
aid to honest people who didn't see the photo in its original
context.
I agree that it certainly can't hurt, although I would think going
back to embed copyright EXIF in older pics is probably a waste of
time. It's not likely that someone iss going to find your photo in a
secondary source -- like a commercial webiste -- and try to track
down the source. People looking for art tend to go to places where
there's a lot of it'' flickr or photo.net. If they want to go legit
and buy the image, the shooter's contact info is available, and
copyright information is noted on the site. Of course there is a
chance that someone might pick up a photo from a second or third hand
source, but quite frankly, I haven't heard of it happening.
What's going on is when I first got a digital camera back in 2004, I
didn't know anything about "workflow"; never heard of it. My files from
back then are kind of a jumble.
I did get the word fairly early to save edits as copies and conserve the
original files, but what I ended up with is folders with mixed JPEG,
TIFF and occasionally RAW files, with a lot of file names like "copy of
IMGPxxxxCopy2.TIFF".
I'm going through these old files looking for good images I've
neglected. At the same time, I'm organizing them in a consistent manner
using my current filing and naming convention:
Folder "YYYYMMMDD EVENT or LOCATION"
... sub-folder "Working" files
...... sub-folder "Output" files.
Additionally, since I now have 3 Pentax DSLRs, I want the image file
name to tell me at a glance which camera it was taken with - I'm
replacing the IMGP or _IGP ... with "istD", "K10D" or "K20D".
And what I'm finding is I don't have them all in one place.
There's a couple of gaps approximately 90 images each and one from Dec
2004 through Mar 2005 that's about 1800 images. I'm sure I've got them
backed up, if nothing else they're on CDs in my safety deposit box. All
I gotta' do is remember where I put the key to the safety deposit box &
wait for the credit union to open.
But while I'm doing all that other stuff, it only adds a few mouse
clicks to fill in the Meta-data with the copyright. I'm not really
worried about someone taking the images as much as I just want
everything ORGANIZED THE SAME, and I am filling in the Meta-data with
copyright for new images as I copy them onto the computer.
I was just wondering if there was any compelling reason I should NOT do
this for the old files, and while I was thinking about it my curiosity
was aroused about copyright in general.
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