Q. re: copyrighting work before uploading to website 2004-04-14 - By D. Waschow
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I suppose you need to ask yourself what your reason is for protecting your
work.
Are you worried that some commercial entity will steal your work and use it in
their promotional material and/or sell it as their own product? Or are you more
concerned that some random person might snag your work and use it as a
background on their personal web site?
In all honesty, the former is highly unlikely. No matter how amazingly good
your work is, the chances of an established company grabbing it off the
internet and then trying to use it as their own would be extremely foolish and
risky. They would have to assume that the image was copyrighted, making any
commercial use of the work subject to possible legal action.
As for someone displaying your work on their web site, I suppose it's a
possibility. But unless they are specifically stating that they created it, who
cares? It really doesn't do you any harm to have your work spicing up someone's
web site. Sure, you're not getting "proper credit," but if the only reason
you're creating art is for the fame and fortune, you're probably doing it for
the wrong reason. :-)
For a little piece of mind, you could use the Digimarc services like I do. For
a relatively low fee you get a unique identifyer that gets embedded into your
media (invisible watermarking) that is read-able and is very hard to destroy,
even if the image is altered. The plug-ins for embedding/reading the watermarks
are free, but you need to subscribe to their service to get your unique ID
code. The plug-ins work in Photoshop or any other photo editor that can use
Photoshop plug-ins.
Here's an example image using Digimarc:
http://www.skwerm.com/misc/McCormick_Falls_WM.jpg
If you load the image into a photo editor and use the free Digimarc plug-in to
read the image, a dialog will pop up saying who owns the picture (User ID) and
has a button to click that will take you to my photo web site.
Hope this info helps.
Cheers!
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Darren L. Waschow
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