Caught this cheeky fecker wandering up to Simon Andrews at Oulton to get some photos signed.
Except they aren’t his photos, they’re mine! He’s printed them, chopped off the watermark flash and doubtless gonna flog’em on ebay or some other flea market.
So I asked him if they were his: “Yes”, then “Oh well, a mate took them actually” when I pressed him on which corners they were from (Brands round 1) and he knew he’d been caught out.
Of course it’s the risk of posting on the internet but the whole meeting could have gone better if he’d just been honest, once I’d calmed down it’s not really the biggest crime of the decade and I’m certainly not the first to be ripped off like this.
No! as soon as an image is created, copyright vests in the photographer / creator. Unless explicit release is given into the public domain or the image is licensed under a specific license (see creative commons) then the creator has copyright as per the Berne convention.
There is such a fine line between posting a decent enough size so people can enjoy the photo online and hopefully purchase the image and watermark/degrade it enough so it can’t be copied and used for personal gain. Have had to deal with this myself and get eBay to remove the images being sold as originals. A right frightfully pain to do this.
The law has changed i’m afraid where the internet is concerned.
If the copyright is not indicated on the image (on the internet) then it is now considered freely available for use - even for commercial gain.
The fact he chopped off the watermark etc just means he could state the images he found were like that - eg another site cut off the watermark and published them which would make his use of them legal.
Its a sh1t, but i’m afraid the only way to truly watermark your images now is to run it right across the image which spoils it for its intended use.
Basically whatever you post online you have to accept is pretty much fair game to be used elsewhere.
It’s odd, if he’d just said he found them on the net and liked them then I’d have been ok about it. I do accept that images on the net are likely (or perhaps even legally allowed) to be taken and used elsewhere, and unless Jay agrees to put the full watermark across all sizes that’s what we accept.
It was just the weasly lying about it being his etc etc which initially I was taken aback with, then annoyed.
Could you point me to that changed law please? I was aware of attempts to do this to ‘orphaned works’ during the digital economy act, but I was under the impression that the photographers won that ? (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/04/19/how_bpi_and_stop43_won/)
