Another Reason to Register Your Photos with the Copyright Office

This week­end, Thomas Hawk wrote a cou­ple of posts about copy­right infringe­ment by Imagel​ogr​.com and Wapfever​.com. They were basi­cally scour­ing Flickr and other parts of the Inter­net to grab images with­out regard for the author’s copy­right, down­load­ing them to host on their own servers and then offer­ing those images up to their cus­tomers. At least Imagel​ogr​.com had the good sense to shut down. Going to that site now re-​directs to Domain​logr​.com. I never had the chance to check that site for any infringe­ment of my images. How­ever, Wapfever was still host­ing and I found 45 of my images on their site, ready for oth­ers to download.

Do these sites truly rise to the level of infringe­ment? Car­olyn E. Wright of the Photo Attor­ney blog has a use­ful post about infringe­ment. The first thing she advises is to make copies of the infringe­ment, before they have a chance to erase the evi­dence. I did that for all of my images I found on the Wapfever site. I’m try­ing to decide what, if any, action I want to take next. Most of the images were not reg­is­tered with the Copy­right office, though some were.

It turns out that reg­is­tra­tion with the Copy­right Office is the key to statu­tory dam­ages and attorney’s fees. Yes, you own the copy­right on any image you own. How­ever, reg­is­tra­tion strength­ens your claim. From what I’ve been told, no judge wants to hear a copy­right case if the images weren’t reg­is­tered. You may be able to get some value from unreg­is­tered claims, but statu­tory dam­ages (per the Pho­toAt­tor­ney blog) can be up to $150K. That makes the $35 reg­is­tra­tion fee seem worth the effort.

I’ve reg­is­tered every image I’ve cre­ated start­ing late last year and I’m in the process of reg­is­ter­ing old images. There is a bit of a dif­fer­ence for images that have been pub­lished already (e.g., posted on the blog or Flickr counts as pub­lish­ing), so I have to sep­a­rate my reg­is­tra­tions. Still, you can reg­is­ter in bulk. I took 502 pho­tos this week­end and reg­is­tered them all in the same batch for $35. I don’t pub­lish a thing until the reg­is­tra­tion is com­plete. The offi­cial let­ter comes a few weeks later.

Jack Reznicki and Ed Green­berg have a course on copy­right reg­is­tra­tion on Kel​by​Train​ing​.com. They walked through the process, showed you how to fill out the forms and then save your entries as a tem­plate to make reg­is­tra­tion much faster & eas­ier on sub­se­quent vis­its. It takes me longer to export and zip the pho­tos I’m going to reg­is­ter than it does to actu­ally go through the reg­is­tra­tion process.

At Pho­to­shop World in Orlando, I spoke briefly with Jack to tell him how much I appre­ci­ated the course (he was pro­vid­ing the same infor­ma­tion at Pho­to­shop World in the Expo Hall). He let me know that he had recently earned sev­eral thou­sand dol­lars after find­ing some­one who infringed upon one of his reg­is­tered images. It’s part of his income stream. When I found some of my reg­is­tered images on this site, my first thought was Ka-​Ching! Of course, that may or may not be the case. I have the saved copies of my pho­tos on their web­site, but I think I want to find an attor­ney to guide me through this expe­ri­ence. As Car­olyn men­tions on the post I ref­er­enced, it may not be a copy­right infringe­ment. I’ll find out and this will be yet another learn­ing expe­ri­ence for me.

Iron­i­cally, one of the images of mine I found on the Wapfever site was this one of Jack Reznicki — one of the Peo­ple You Meet at Pho­to­shop World.