Did Someone Remove The Copyright Notice From Your Photograph?

Categories

Featured Products

If you follow me on Facebook, you may have seen a few instances from 2011 where my photos were used on blogs, fliers, and elsewhere online and in print without permission.  No credit was given.  Watermark removed from the photo.  Photolaw.net wrote the article below for MCP Actions readers to help photographers and bloggers alike.

Photographers, learn how to protect your photos from theft and learn what you can do if your rights are violated. You will learn why using a tool like the free MCP Facebook Fix Photoshop action set – watermarking actions protects you, even if it is easy to remove.

Please post questions you have in the comment section below. Hopefully I can have them write a follow up article answering some of them.

DID SOMEONE REMOVE THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE FROM YOUR PHOTOGRAPH?

© 2011 Andrew D. Epstein, Esq. and Beth Wolfson, Esq., Barker Epstein & Loscocco, 10 Winthrop Square, Boston, MA  02110; (617) 482-4900; www.Photolaw.net.

What if you publish a photograph on a calendar, on your website or in a magazine, and you carefully include a copyright notice, and someone takes the photograph, copies it and removes the copyright information?  Well, as the result of a fairly new law called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (or DMCA), you have a remedy.

If someone copies your work, whether a photograph, a painting, or an article, without your permission, it is copyright infringement.  However, most people do not know that it is also a violation of copyright law for someone to remove a copyright notice from the work. Removing or altering a copyright notice from an image or stripping metadata from the picture file is a violation of the DMCA.  A person can be liable for between $2,500 and $25,000 plus attorney’s fees for removing from a work what the DMCA calls “copyright management information” from a work.

To win a case under the DMCA, the name of the author, or copyright owner, or the copyright notice must have been removed from the work or altered.  The DMCA refers to this as “copyright management information.”

In a New Jersey case (Murphy v. Millenium Radio Group LLC), a photographer photographed two DJs.  The picture was published in a magazine with a credit to the photographer along the edge of the page. A radio station employee scanned the photo and posted it on the radio station’s website, and asked fans to alter the picture in a contest. The court determined that even a photo credit printed in the gutter of a magazine qualifies as copyright management information under the DMCA, and the photographer was awarded damages.

In another case (McClatchey v. Associated Press), the Associated Press (AP) took a picture of one of the plaintiff’s photographs from her portfolio without the photographer’s permission.  The original photograph depicted the mushroom cloud caused by the crash of Flight 93 into a Pennsylvania field on 9/11.  The AP then redistributed the plaintiff’s photograph but replaced the plaintiff’s copyright information with its own.  The photographer was entitled to damages.

There are protections built into the DMCA, that protect certain internet businesses from liability for the acts of their users.  Internet Access Providers (“IAPs”, also known as Internet Service Providers, “ISPs”) such as AOL, Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon, and Online Service Providers (“OSPs”), such as Google, Yahoo, eBay, Amazon, Expedia, Craigslist, web hosting services and social media websites like Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, and Flickr, can avoid liability under the DMCA if other copyrighted works are uploaded to these sites by their users, with the copyright management information removed. The IAPs and OSPs can only avoid liability if they are pre-registered with the U.S. Copyright Office.  Most of the big internet businesses are pre-registered.

If you detect that an individual user has removed your copyright management information and posted your work onto an IAP or OSP, you must send a letter to the IAP or OSP requesting the removal of the copyrighted material.  Almost all of the larger IAPs and OSPs have a form on their websites where you can send a “Takedown Notice.” This can be done electronically.  If the user believes they did not post infringing content and their content was removed by the IAP or OSP, the user can file a counter-notice to get their content restored to the website.

We recommend always attaching a watermark or other copyright management information to all works that you distribute.  Although you do not need to have a copyright registration to recover under the DMCA, we always recommend registering your photographs with the Copyright Office to be able to qualify for maximum awards for copyright infringement ($750 to $150,000 per infringement, plus costs and attorney’s fees).

MCPActions

No Comments

  1. jackie hensley on February 13, 2012 at 9:14 am

    It just makes me so angry that people would do this.

  2. Angel on February 13, 2012 at 9:27 am

    Wow! That is great information. How do you register your photographs with the Copyright Office? Thanks:)

  3. Lesley on February 13, 2012 at 10:06 am

    they really need to start teaching this to school aged children. No matter how many times I tell my teenage step daughter that you can’t just take images off the itnerent or scan photos (from say a vacation trip done by a resort photographer) and post on FB she does not listen. None of her friends do. They have no concept that this is wrong and I am always the bad person for bringing it up. There are times when I just wish she or oneo f her friends would get caught and punhished so it would sink in. I think it is only going to get worse.

    • Jodi Friedman, MCP Actions on February 13, 2012 at 7:30 pm

      Even relatives of mine have said “just scan and print it” – referring to things like school pictures or photos from a photog on vacation. Um… NO. If you want it, buy it.

  4. Zarah on February 13, 2012 at 10:23 am

    People are awful, sometimes!!Luckily, there are others. Like you – who take the time to share your knowledge. Thank you!!

  5. Jen Raff on February 13, 2012 at 10:28 am

    how can we know if our photos are stolen?

  6. Alice C. on February 13, 2012 at 12:31 pm

    Copyright law can be hard for people to grasp! Thanks for this informative post.

  7. Sarah C on February 13, 2012 at 3:37 pm

    Thanks for the info!

  8. Ang on February 13, 2012 at 4:46 pm

    A very timely article. Just learned that one of my photos was printed in my local paper without proper credit. It’s not always done by the ignorant…Some people really should know better.

  9. Dogstar on February 13, 2012 at 6:42 pm

    I find it ironic that why most of you would say that doing this to a photo is wrong, you probably have iPods full of illegally obtained music. “He without sin cast the first stone.”

    • Jodi Friedman, MCP Actions on February 13, 2012 at 7:28 pm

      I do not think illegally obtained music is ok actually. We did an article a while back on music, more-so on how photographers cannot just download and use music on their site without proper licensing and permission.

  10. Suzanne V on February 14, 2012 at 10:05 am

    “or stripping metadata from the picture file is a violation of the DMCA” – Doesn’t FB do this to all pictures uploaded? Are they going to help photographers out by changing this practice?Thanks for the article!

  11. Ryan Jaime on February 14, 2012 at 10:31 pm

    sweet read. looking forward for part 2.

  12. Image Masking on February 15, 2012 at 1:04 am

    Great article and very useful information. Thanks a lot for sharing with us !!

  13. Mozby on February 15, 2012 at 4:18 pm

    You appear to not fully understand the consequences of the DCMA. It was not designed to protect small artist like yourself, it was designed to protect movie studios and record companies. Here’s an example how it can hurt you, anyone can file a DMCA claim that you are using their copyrighted material. The claim may be frivolous, untrue, malicious persecution, whatever, but they can still file a claim. You will receive a “Cease and Desist” notice from the person or corporation involved. This will frequently be followed by a “Notice of Infringement” from your web host with instructions stating that if you don’t remove the material in question, they will shut down your entire website. Your choices at this point consist of complying with the order to remove the material, or forget about your website. In either case the material will be removed from the Internet. As a website owner, you are declared guilty with immediate punishment applied. Forget about the 4th Amendment, due process, etc. You are declared guilty. You then have to prove yourself innocent. You must remove the material even if you intend to fight back. DCMA assumes you are guilty until proven innocent.

    • Mozby on February 15, 2012 at 4:22 pm

      Additionally, DCMA is a US based law. Foreign countries have no obligation to follow it. I can’t tell you how many images of mine I have found on Chinese and Russian based servers. Good luck getting them down.

  14. Marcia Pirani on February 18, 2012 at 11:39 pm

    Shared your photo contest on interest. Your action rock! I so love them!

Leave a Comment

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Categories

Recent Posts