The Tips in detail

 "How to claim my copyright?"

Once you´ve got your image done how do you copyright it so nobody can use it without my permission?

If you are having Adobe Photoshop: It comes along with a free plugin from Digimarc that allows you to watermark your images. You can register it for free on the web, look at the plugin and the website for more info. It causes a little loss, but invisibly marks you as the owner.

In North America, the moment you create an image it is copyrighted. The problem is to prove it. Professional studios often use a "brand agent" which is a lawyer office specialised in copyrighting, trade marks, and so on. They simply register your work officially with a date (that's for copyrights. Trademarks are an other business).

If you don't want to spend money on lawyers, you could simply post yourself a copy of your work and keep the envelope unopened in a safe place. The mail stamp will officialize the date.

Remember that copyright officialisation only confirms that your work existed at time X. However, it's up to you to take the measures necessary to deal with unauthorized use of your work. You could split that in two categories: Prevention and Infraction.

Prevention:

• Register your copyright for proof
• Watermark your published work

  Several ways to do so:

  • Copyright info written on your image
  • Watermark software applyed on your image (see above).
  • Copyright info + procedures on your medium (ie. CD-Rom, HTML-document, pp.)
  • Remind the viewer it's your work he's looking at.

Infraction:

• Write a letter (registered, keep a copy) informing them they are using your work without your permission and that, if they want to use it, you're open to discuss the conditions for your approval.
• If there's no reply (or dead-on refusal to comply) you'll have to take legal action.

If you get aware of unauthorized use of your work, you have to take action as soon as you discover it.

It's important to do so, otherwise you could be blamed of "entrapment", should you decide to sue. An example for "entrapment": One day you stumble on what seems a low-interest product ad which uses your artwork they took from who knows where. The product seems negligable and you decide it's not worth the effort to take action. A couple of years later that product becomes a hit for innexplicable reasons and they still use your image in ads. If you decide to sue at that moment, you may not receive what you expected, based on your inaction at the beginning that could be inerterpreted as ambushing the company to make big bucks. Arguably, the company could also defend itself by saying you waived your rights to that artwork in regard to them by waiting that long without action.

There are a number of options that you have. As some people already stated, put "Copyright..." onto your image. Some have said you should contact a lawyer. Another trick people have used, including proving that software code is their own, is to make a printed veresion of something back to yourself - so it get the postal marking on it with a date. There are still other methods. There is a website(and i wish I knew the URL offhand) which has a way of copyrighting things and using there service as proof. And, I have heard there is also supposed to be software that actually encodes your image with codes that people can't see - and you can legally use it to proove it is yours. I believe I saw a German group at SIGGraph that was showing off this exact method. I think they were from the Fraunhoffer Institute or something like that...

You can also sign your documents with PGP (have a loot at your local ftp-server next door), since PGP stamps a date of creation inside the signature. Using a private key you already registered at any keyserver you get another point of marking something as your property. But signing an image document with PGP creates a separate file containing the signature, which you should place along with the actual image.

compiled with hints from:
Unit 6 (zcwilson@acsu.buffalo.edu),
Jean-Sébastien Dussault (jsd@chaos-tech.com) and
Kurt Wendt (kwendt@ix.netcom.com)