Hear hear! Great approach on a difficult topic for some. You summarized it well at the end. If you don't want it stolen, don't post it anywhere. Love the sentiment at 2:50! I've been following block chain for years. Looking forward to seeing what is in store. Thanks for bringing that up!
Your comment about Instagram is excellent! There are photo thieves out there - they crop the photo and repost them as their own. Or worse, they remove the copyright watermarks in the middle of the photos and repost them as their own.
Happened to me. Some dude that i know was copying sime of my photos from Facebook and posting them as his own on Instagram. Had no protection, but was able to get him retract my pictures. Now every time he post stuff, i always doubt they are really his.
I've had image theft in terms of photos being used as memes, etc., for non commercial purposes. My attitude is that if they leave my signature in tact and/or credit me, then I send them a thankyou note fir the free advertising. However, I have had stolen images show up in commercial advertising and even on billboards. In that instance, I go after them hammer and tong and get payment for the usage - most large companies/brands will quietly pay up rather than get sued or smeared on the internet. Remember, never share your original RAW files as they are absolute proof of ownership.
10:38 Good idea! Another method of protection can be to email yourself images before making them available for licensing and/or viewable by public. Photo details, specs, authorship, attachments, etc. would be logged/dated by email host's servers; hard for bad guys to claim ownership when it's (almost) impossible to beat real author's recorded bonafides. Also, emailing yourself is (usually) free! ✌👏
Good video on an important topic. My wife owns a food blogging business. She pays photographers good money to own the images. For her, it makes sense for others to post her images. I think there’s something much, much, worse. AI. AI has the images uploaded by so many people. It won’t be long before anyone can buy an image that they’ve “created” by prompting AI for “An image as if taken from the middle of Seventh Ave at 7pm in mid-Summer, no traffic except for - here insert product….and on and on.” And the generated image will be based on images an AI company didn’t pay a photographer for.”
I have had only 1 photo used commercially without my permission that I'm aware of. It was a photo of an artist at her concert where there was no restriction on cameras. The artist's webmaster put the photo on the artist's website. When I found out, I asked the artist to credit me or remove the photo. It was removed.
The companies I use for websites prevent rick clicking my images. The only thing is taking screen shots but it's my experience doing screen shots is not as high quality. I understand about upscaling but I don't think it will work for that very well. I also embed my metadata with my copyright information. Yes, I had an image stolen from me. A local news publication stole my image for the animal shelter, used it for their news story and on top of that wrote lies about the shelter. I called the publisher and threatened a lawsuit, told them my copyright is embedded in my images and the animal shelter personnel, the police department, were also witnesses to me photographing the animal. They took the images down from their website etc. I will say registering images to US Copyright Office is a good thing and you can submit multiple images.
On the metadata point: I know why it it is but I think it's a shame that popular photo viewing apps (and websites) don't display any of the metadata for photos. They do display it for MP3s. It would be nice if anyone downloading an image and then double clicking to open it in a typical way would see the photographer's name and maybe a few other fields, e.g. photo title, somewhere next to the image.
Years ago a fauxtographer in Oklahoma cloned my website and went through every photo and smudged over the watermarks on every image and replaced them with his own. I was based in Atlanta at the time, and a local agency model saw the site and contacted me, I sued, I won, he filed bankruptcy and fled to Canada
I do youth & hs sports mostly. It would have been nice if you could address people screen shotting from galleries I post. I feel like a large watermark is the solution, but obviously not perfect bc it can also ruin images. I find myself trying to balance protecting my work vs presenting my best work. These are $5/image. Not going to have any legal repercussions unless it’s a big scammer, but it’s mostly players/parents just screen grabbing.
So instagram strips the metadata? I had no idea. Great! On another note, I was at the local fair a few weeks ago, and they wouldn't allow me to take pictures (with phone) of the photos entered, saying it was due to copyright laws. But wouldn't the violation be if I were to post those photos? I was taking photos to be able to look up the photographers and see their website or social media, having the photo helps me remember why I wanted to look them up. It seems people are allowed to take photos in museums, but why not the fair?
What is the process of registering a photo with the copyright office like? Is it overly cumbersome where it's only worth it to do a few "winner" images, or can it handle batch registering of hundreds of images from a shoot at once?
I think social media strips metadata so that GPS information can't be used to find the people that took the picture, since most content in social media are selfies and similar.
Yes. I think social media should really either strip metadata as many do now, or automatically display the metadata on the page so that everyone knows that its there. Keeping it in but hiding it so you need to download the image and use specific software to view it makes it too easy for users to unknowingly share more information than they want to.
@@DavidBergmanPhoto there is screenshot protection though is what I’m saying. The only type of protection there isn’t is taking a picture of the screen itself.
They put their Watermark on a photo of me! I didn't want an ugly watermark on my photo of me. So what gives them the right for Google Play to put Watermarks on my photos. It pisses me off!
The blockchain thing makes no sense to me. It can't be a completely reliable source on the current legal ownership of any asset since that's controlled by the courts, and the courts may not be able to get the blockchain record updated.
Screen shot....removes all metadata. Good luck getting someone to stop using your photo, esp if they are overseas. This video is pointless. If someone wants your photo....they will find it very simple to take, no matter what. I have had several photos stolen and are being used despite letters sent, lawyers, and overseas (cant do a thing). It is frustrating to see someone else claim your work as thier own and make.more.mony off of it than you can.
Hey David I have to unsubscribe because of the lack of common sense with adorama always liked your videos but I have to start watching godox and b&h thanks for your tips.
