The Library of Congress website has an extensive and straightforward section on copyright..

Assuming you're in the US...

It is a legal question which means the answers go on endlessy....

Basically anything you produce is copyrighted, but without registration, or at the least a mark, lack of proof makes a fight tough..

As a fire department photographer, I cannot claim copyright due to my 'employee' status..

Some usefull links:.

Http://photography.about.com/cs/businessmatters/ht/ht_Copyright.htm.

Http://www.copyright.gov/.

Http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ40.html.

Http://www.ephotofiles.com/copyright.htmlDogratty..

Been asking myself the same questions. The UK patent office has a very good section on copyright on it's website. See:.

Http://www.patent.gov.uk/copy/index.htm.

And in particular:.

Http://www.patent.gov.uk/copy/indetail/copyinter.htm :.

"Under UK law (the position in other countries may differ) copyright material sent over the Internet or stored on web servers will generally be protected in the same way as material in other media. So anyone wishing to put copyright material on the Internet, or further distribute or download such material that others have placed on the Internet, should ensure that they have the permission of the owners of rights in the material..

Generally, when you put your work on a web site, it is probably a good idea to mark each page of the web site with the international mark followed by the name of the copyright owner and year of publication. In addition, you could include information on your web site about the extent to which you are content for others to use your copyright material without permission. Although material on a web site is protected by copyright in the same way as material in other media, you should bear in mind that web sites are accessible from all over the world and, if material on your web site is used without your permission, you would generally need to take action for copyright infringement where this use occurs.".

Hope this helps..

Nick..

I think copyrighting something only protects you from basically honest people. Anyone who is hell bent on ripping you off will find a justification and a way to do it no matter what. I've had two photos of mine used in the past in books without my permission. Both times, it would have been a real fight to prove my case in court. Then, even if I won the case, I'd still have to collect for damages. Having said all that....

I just copyrighted my website pages with the Library of Congress at the urging of a friend who had 48 web pages ripped off by another real estate company. It was very easy to do and at the time only cost $30 USD. I believe that cost is now slightly higher now..

The way I understand it, you don't have to copyright something for you to retain the copyright. But what formal copyrighting does is define penalties for infringement and it also makes it a Federal crime. That aspect is very important if you do get ripped off, because you can file a claim against someone in the Federal court in your state. If it weren't a federal crime you'd have to travel to where the infringement actually took place to file the law suit. With the internet, that could be anywhere. Once you file a law suit in your state, the offender has to travel to your state to defend themselves..

Also, in the case of websites, only those files which were submitted to the copyright office are actually copyrighted. So, every few months or perhaps once a year, you have to submit the changes to be added to the library of congress files..

I submitted the contents of my entire website on CD with hard paper copies of sample pages. I also submitted about 12each 8 x 12 contact sheets with a total of about 400 photos on them. Once sent off by certified letter, it took about 3 months and I received my Library of congress notice which was back dated to the date of filing. All in all, it was not difficult to do..

So, will this protect me from a rippoff artist? Probably not, but at least now if I go to court, I can prove that everything on my website is really mine..

Check out this site for some more info..

Http://bermangraphics.com/tips/legalrights.htm.

Http://garypalamara.com/Gallery.htm..

OBTW.

In case you didn't know it, in photoshop or ms word, if you hold down the "ALT" key and type in the numbers "0169" you will get the copyright symbol ..

When I put my photos on the internet, I followed Scott Kelby's tutorial in his photoshop books on making a Custom Brush tool. Using his method, any time I need to put a symbol on a photo I just call up the "brush" that I created and insert it over the image. It's so easy and you can resize it or color the brush to stand out against any background. Hope that helps.http://garypalamara.com/Gallery.htm..

Does anyone know how to keep people from copy/pasting the picture? I've seen that on different websites, and I've heard of people using it. They can't right-click the picture, copy and paste, or try to go to file- save picture as (it will just save a blank page), or file-copy then paste. That would be a great help!Lindsey..

LFitch,.

There are some limited ways to prevent that. The most common and easiest way is to use Javascript to disable the right click on the mouse. That is the easiest thing to do, but also you can easily get around it too. For anyone semi-savvy, instead of worry about the right click, they can view the HTML source and find the tag that contains a reference to your image and then just put that directly into the browser and proceed to download the picture..

But, there is another product out there that was more interesting and made it even harder. Basically, this product was a little script you ran on all of your HTML pages. It encoded every page (think it was just a base64 encoding scheme or something similar), then the output was a call to a javascript function which decoded the encoded piece. It disabled the right click button (and this was great even for text b/c it prevented copying and pasting of the text) and if someone tried to view the HTML source, it was just a base 64 encoded text with a javascript function call. yeah, someone could then reverse engineer and if they knew what they were doing, it may not be that hard, BUT I would imagine it would stop prob 95% of the people right then and there..

In the end, there is nothing you can do (as far as I know) to fully protect your images from being downloaded. You can do things obviously to make it less desirable to download (watermark). For instance, one could even go as far as packet sniffing to see all of the bytes coming into the computer and isolate the images. But like your home or car, you can't make it 100% burglar proof but you can make it hard..

I'll see if I can find the software for encoding the HTML page. But you can use javascript to disable the right click button at least and that would probably stop 50% of the people, if that.Just trying to learn.

Blog: http://novicephotog.blogspot.com/Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/9778447@N07/..

LFitch, here are so links that may be of help. Note I am not endorsing them nor have I ever used or downloaded them. I just found them off google..

Http://www.share2s.com/protect.html.

Http://www.html-encrypt.com/.

Http://www.antssoft.com/htmlprotector/index.htm.

I was looking through old email b/c my father in-law used a product that cost around $29.95 that prevented the old copy and paste problems and protected web site content, but couldn't find the one he used. Not mentioned in the emails. I'll email him to get the specific program he used b/c that one I know did work and was legit..

Just trying to learn.

Blog: http://novicephotog.blogspot.com/Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/9778447@N07/..

Wow, thanks for all your help riceowl! You didn't have to go through all that trouble to get me the info, I do appreciate it! I'm going to check out that software and see how well it does L...