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copyright protection submitting photos for potential sale


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Can anyone tell me the cheapest way to protect the 20-30 photos that

I'm about to submit to a few companies to see if they would like to

buy rights to any of them. At the moment I'm broke so I think

Digimarc might not be an option...plus I'm hoping there's a way to

protect photos in general without having to specifically register

each one, which I think might be the case with digimarc or

copyrighting in general (I could be wrong though).

Thanks for your help!

- dave green

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David:

 

Read through the content about copyright at loc.gov and that'll give you all the info you need on copyright, if you're in the US.

 

As a side-note, if you submit your images to serious publishers the risk that your images will be miss-used is slim to none. This is a very small industry and if a publisher treats a photographer badly that fact spreads like wild-fire and the publisher in question would see his/her image supply dry up very fast indeed. Over all the years I have submitted images to newspapers, magazines and book-publishers I have had images miss-used twice and on both occasions the images in questions were low-res lifted from my site and the usage was by a small church bulletin and by a blog in Iceland. Both uses stopped immediately when I notified them that what they had done was illegal.

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Go to the U.S. Copyright Office website and review the information about registering groups of unpublished photographs as collections. This allows you to register as many images as you want for the single $30 fee. While it is true that you own the copyright at the moment of creation, unless you register the images before they are infringed, your practical legal remedies are nil.
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As far as I know you can register only 30 single images per $30 fee. You can register

them as a group if you've got under 30 images. It's a very wise decision. You can even

do it after publication, but it needs to be within a certain time frame. It takes about 6

months to get your registration back, but it is effective from the date they receive it in

the office. I would send it certified mail with a return receipt, that way if anything

happened in the meantime, you've got proof of when they got it etc, and just so you

know they've received it properly. It's a simple process. A bit of paperwork, but it's

worth it.

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if you are in the USA You can register all photos for a fee of $30.00 . Basically: all 30

photos (or more or less) have to sent as one submission..

www.editorialphotographers.com (specifically:

<a href = http://www.editorialphoto.com/copyright/index.html>

http://www.editorialphoto.com/copyright/index.html</a>) has links to detail info

about how to register your copyright.

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