Hi folks,
the government's trying to push through some new legislation that will have a dire effect on your IP if you're not careful and will probably bring the occupation of photography to its knees.
Orphan work (OP):
OPs are pieces of material (written, digital, art, music, music scores, photographs etc) where the creator of the piece of work cannot be identified. If the government succeeds in changing the copyright legislation - any piece of piece of work that is found to be an OP will be able to be used by any business for free - providing it's made an attempt to identify the creator/owner of the work.
There is an organisation that the government's IP office is advertising on their site (http://www.ipo.gov.uk/types/copy.htm) but it looks expensive if you have a lot of images to protect. It also strikes me as a tax on creative people before they even manage to earn any icome from their endeavours.
How does this affect us?
If you want to protect your work from immoral use, you must take steps to ensure that your work is identifiable in a number of ways:
1. Start changing your file names to include a copyright tag and your name - eg 'Kingfisher025 copright Villayat Sunkmanitu'.
2. Ensure that you have entered details via xmp for CS users or directly edit your EXIF and ensure that the copyright tag is present there as well.
3. Do NOT load images of any commercial value to social networking sites like Facebook (FB), as by doing so you are automatically granting them a free licence to use your work in adverts or to sub-licence your images to any 3rd party companies. I have stripped all of my commerical images from FB - even though they were watermarked. Those of you that use photoshop know how easy it is to remove a standard watermark. If you have happen to lease images for website use, 300-500 pixels is adequate for website usage - make sure you have both a watermark and a logo to hide some of the image. See my images on here for an example.
4. Check every site/forum that you use and save your image back to your PC and add the site to a list on this discussion if they remove ANY part of your metadata - I'm trying to compile a list of sites that abuse IP rights. So far I have FB and Twitter.
I'm happy to say that talkwildlife.com does not strip any metadata from uploaded images, whereas FB completely strip everything - including your image title.
If you're a FB user - please support https://www.facebook.com/RespectIP by clicking the 'like' button.
Also keep an eye on https://www.facebook.com/ArtistsRights and look back over older entries where our rights have been discussed in some detail. Don't get caught out by this. There is a select committee of 5 MPs currently examining the issues and going over evidence that has been submitted to them. When you examin the resumes of the MPs concerned, it's clear that none of them have any awareness of the issues affecting creative people in the UK.
Lastly, I'm gearing up for my 3rd exhibition - I'd appreciate a 'like' click on https://www.facebook.com/Wolf.Photographer ;)
All the best
Wolf
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