Congrats on the book Wesley! One question that came up for me today that I thought to present to you is on copyright. Do you generally register photos with the copyright office (before or after publication)? And did you register the book "Notice" before publication?
Generally speaking, and many folks don't know this, but in the US the act of creating a work automatically generates a copyright as well. You can also register the work for extra protection but technically not necessary.
That is true and has been my general way of approaching copyright enforcement of my photos for many years, but recently I have been rethinking that, particularly in regard to a photography curriculum / concept that I am working on that I just registered in advance of release.
In my experience, most of my images were commonly misused via online publication. In that case, it is possible to send a DMCA take-down and even settle on a fair licensing fee, all without going to court.
However, should it ever be necessary to go to court, the case will be thrown out unless the work is registered with the copyright office first. It is still possible to register it at the time of an infringement, but then the copyright holder has a lot less legal standing than had they registered it before the work was published (or up to 3 months after first publication).
For example they are still on the hook to pay attorney fees even if they win the case. And they can only sue for actual damages (aka, equivalent of the licensing fee) resulting from the infringement vs statutory damages which can be much higher.
One other complicating factor is it used to be possible to register an unlimited number of photos in one batch of a "group of unpublished photographs" for a flat $55 fee. I think that stock / pro photographers used to take advantage of this and register every photo they created in a fixed time (1 batch per month for example).
In 2018 that was changed to be a max of 750 photos per batch which in some cases resulted in pretty significant cost increases for photographers who were used to registering thousands of images at a time.
Hope you are coming back soon! I had to check to be sure your posts weren't going to my spam folder.
good timing :) coming back today!
Congrats on the book Wesley! One question that came up for me today that I thought to present to you is on copyright. Do you generally register photos with the copyright office (before or after publication)? And did you register the book "Notice" before publication?
Generally speaking, and many folks don't know this, but in the US the act of creating a work automatically generates a copyright as well. You can also register the work for extra protection but technically not necessary.
That is true and has been my general way of approaching copyright enforcement of my photos for many years, but recently I have been rethinking that, particularly in regard to a photography curriculum / concept that I am working on that I just registered in advance of release.
In my experience, most of my images were commonly misused via online publication. In that case, it is possible to send a DMCA take-down and even settle on a fair licensing fee, all without going to court.
However, should it ever be necessary to go to court, the case will be thrown out unless the work is registered with the copyright office first. It is still possible to register it at the time of an infringement, but then the copyright holder has a lot less legal standing than had they registered it before the work was published (or up to 3 months after first publication).
For example they are still on the hook to pay attorney fees even if they win the case. And they can only sue for actual damages (aka, equivalent of the licensing fee) resulting from the infringement vs statutory damages which can be much higher.
One other complicating factor is it used to be possible to register an unlimited number of photos in one batch of a "group of unpublished photographs" for a flat $55 fee. I think that stock / pro photographers used to take advantage of this and register every photo they created in a fixed time (1 batch per month for example).
In 2018 that was changed to be a max of 750 photos per batch which in some cases resulted in pretty significant cost increases for photographers who were used to registering thousands of images at a time.
Thank you for all that insight Jason! So interesting how they changed these rules. Good tips in here on how to go about things.