Allowing someone to use your photo??

[TheFriendlyPlanter]

I'm sure a few people here will be able to advise me.

I've been asked a few times (via email) if people could use some of my plant pics for things like information brochures or boardwalk signs etc, and I'm wondering how exactly does copyright work for a pic.

How does one go about allowing someone to use their pic without accidentally giving-up the rights to their own picture.

Do you just make a written agreement, like "Yes, you may use this pic in your boardwalk sign. As long as you acknowledge my name for the photo, and it is not used again for anything else without my permission, thankyou"

Should I put a small copyright symbol on it with my name just to be sure?

I really don't even want to be named but I don't want to loose the rights to my own pic.

I met a guy who lost the rights of his pic to the CSIRO because they obtained it without copyright, and then used it so much that they didn't want him to start charging them usage fees etc. Now he can't even use his own pic and he's an authority in his field.

I've allowed usage a number of times but never really known if I was doing it right and this latest guy doesn't really know either.

Edited December 4, 2010 by Quantum turkey

[occidentalis]

Under Australian copyright law, you never lose the rights to your creation unless you deliberately sign them away.

Creative Commons licenses are pretty useful. You can pick one that suits your purposes and make it clear in writing that you are allowing the use of your photo under those conditions only.

with the guy who lost his photo to CSIRO, as I understand it the only situation where that could happen would be if he couldn't prove that he took the photo originally.

If you have proof that it is originally your photo (ie you have the original raw file, or an uncompressed jpg on your computer, and the other party doesn't; and/or if the EXIF data says it was taken with a camera and lens that you own, etc...) then you should be fine if it came down to a court case. You can also put tags in EXIF data with some cameras, so you can put your name. Not that hard to strip out EXIF data, but another layer of protection.

Whether or not you watermark is up to you; some photographers do, some don't. Personally i think it's a bit of a waste of time and the only reason I would do it is if I was making available sample photos for a client or whatever, and in that case I would put a big watermark across the whole photo. Small ones on the bottom can always just be cropped out. Basically if you're dealing with the kind of person who will intentionally try and steal your photo, then there are very few technical barriers in the way of that, so why ruin your photos with watermarks?

[~shameless~]

Once you have given permission and made ownership of the photo clear to use one of your good photos you could have some thing like this for example in small font at the bottom right hand corner of the photo.

Say for instance cos i dont know your real name

Photo by Q turkey

Enquiries welcome

Ph 040111111

[Foo]

If you are releasing these pics for free, attach a licence to them. The GNU Licence is intended for software but works perfectly for images.

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html

The creative commons licence's are also good ones.

http://creativecommons.org.au/learn-more/licences

By letting someone use your photos under these licences protects your rights and makes it clearer for the person recieving what they can and cant do with the images.

[TheFriendlyPlanter]

Creative commons look pretty good! Cheers for the awesome help!

[Evil Genius]

How about you make a watersign into the pic. It works with most appz like irfan view. I do it sometimes. bye Eg