Copyright Protection

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An astute and honorable member of the MPN community notifies you that a local cover band has lifted 20 pictures you took of said band off your MySpace page and used them on two different websites - MySpace and the band's website. What would you do?

Has anyone been paying attention to the Orphan Works legislation before both houses of the US Congress? Have you actually read both bills? What are your thoughts? I oppose both bills and have written my congress members asking them to oppose these bills.

This writer asked me to take part in a book about a band I know well. As I didn't like what he wanted to know I declined and informed him that I would take no part in this book at all. I just flipped through a hard copy of the book and found one of my pictures in there. I certainly didn't send it to him.

The book is published. I'm not credited, nor do I want to be, but I feel I should be entitled to some compensation for this.

This comes up often on various photography messages boards. The question is how to block people from hotlinking to your images from other websites. If you post images on Flickr or other photo hosting websites, you have little control over how those images are hotlinked to from other sites. If you have your own website, you have complete control.

Has anyone ever had another "photographer" (and I use this term extremely lightly) take one of your photos, and crop it so our watermark is out. I have sent a DMCA Notice (thanks to Toast's tutorial) to the hosting sites my photo has been on. However, everytime it gets deleted it gets reloaded again. At first it was on TinyPic, that was deleted. Then it was on Image Shack, that was deleted. Now it is on Image Shack again, and I have just sent in my 3rd total DMCA Notice.

OK...I'm taking Walter's advice and trying to incorporate some of his steps into my work flow process. I am editing the metadata and have most fields covered but am a little confused about just what I should put in the last 3 slots. I am entering data in the "IPTC CORE" fields. What should I put in the last slot (rights usage terms?) "All rights reserved?" I put "©Faye Weekly Photography" in the copyright notice slot. Is this right?

I know this has been beaten to death in the MS group but it just happened to me....again! Granted, it's not a big name but he pretty much slapped me in the face so I need to rant. My first question is there anyway folks have gotten good enough to get into the MS albums that are locked?

CAn you guys go into details including what you use for your deposit?

How do you group, ie. do you file after every show or do you say, wait till end of month and file for the whole month or do you even do thee months at a time [per the 90 day publication window]?

Do you file DVDs of images? What kind - jpegs or raw files? What size files/thumbnails you file?

I am still trying to "standardize" my way of grouping and registering.

I took some photos for a friend's band a few weeks ago. They paid me minimally, but we didn't sign any sort of contract (I'll remember this for next time). Well the photo's up at ramsheadlive.com but my name was cropped out and I'm not happy about it. None of the photos on the site give photographer credit anywhere that I can find (which is annoying). Is there anything I can do about this? Don't I own all the rights to my images or did I throw it away by not signing anything???

I am not sure if this is the right area for this, but I have a web tracker for my site.. which is a great way to track down people who have taken images without perssion and then issues DCMA, if needed... but...

I'v noticed a really high increase in this type of hit:

http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.fromthecrowd.com/IMG_7989.JPG&imgrefurl=http://www.fromthecrowd.com/photos.htm&h=82&w=124&sz=13&hl=e

I've had my photo web site domain name for several years, and on my photos I use that name with a copyright citation. (I have reasons for not wanting my own full name on the images.)

Now, I want a different domain name for my site.

How would this affect the 'protection' of images with the previous name? Especially if the site will no longer exist? Was using a web site name even appropriate in the first place, since the web site name is not registered as a corporate entity, and it's me not a company that holds the copyright?

How do you handle copyright infringement? Do you ask the infringer to take down the content? Do you pursue payment for the unauthorized use? Do you get an attorney involved? What are the copyright protection laws in your country? What remedies do they provide?