Dear BE:

My husband designed a poster related to alternative medicine and people are asking to buy the hard copy (It is now sitting in his computer as an electronic file.)

How can he secure the copyright and protect the poster from being copied and sold by third parties once it is out there?

I am worried that when we give the electronic file to the printing company, someone would keep a copy of the file in their system.

Please share your advices?

Thank you very much,

Yasmina (British Columbia)

It's pretty near impossible to protect copyright in today's world.

The best you can do is place a copyright symbol with your husbands name and perhaps the year somewhere on the image. I usually put it in the lower right corner of my photographs if I sell them.

Like this: © Steve_P 2011 to get the copyright symbol press the "alt key" and 0169 on the numeric keypad.

The problem is that if someone does decide to copy his work he has to see it in order to do anything about it. Not much use if you are in Canada and someone in Australia decides to pilfer your image.

A quick google tells me this:

Canada seems to follow other states in granting copyright on creation, for copyright not to exist, you need to relinquish it.

You can register (though not required) your claim at this address

As stated above, the producer of something automatically owns it and there are various rules around the world as to how long after one's death the copyright benefits the estate of the deceased.

The symbol referred to be Steve above achieves nothing.

In essence, generally, it is a breach of the rights of the producer to reproduce it without permission.

Everyone that copies songs. films etc. is liable for damages unless of course the licence that they purchased in the first place allows it (for example, making a copy of a song one has already purchased is usually referred to in the licence purchased.

If two people, independently, produce an identical piece (a song for example) they both own it. Although proving that it was independently produced can be problematic.

Doesn't it tell people who owns the copyright? If I saw (c) Steve_P, then I'd know it was his work. Presumably this is why everyone does it and you see (c) such and such on every piece of intellectual property

Admittedly, as we are well aware, plenty of people will be quite happy to rip it off anyway. So in that sense, it doesn't achieve much.

Hi
An interesting establishment,from what i have heard it is lacking somewhat, and that even work done by others can be copyrighted to someone else.
cheers
Jerry

It does, but as mailing address or contact details are rarely placed, what does it really achieve?

IMO is too widely used and, I suspect, those that use it do not realise why they are doing so. If they believe that, without it, there is no copyright, they are wrong. If they are using it as a middle class "tag" then, in my opinion, they should use something a little more funky

I recognise it's use only protects a person from honest people. I am also fully aware that it is not really needed. I usually place it on prints I sell only because it identifies me as the person who took the picture not necessarily to protect it, sort of like an artist signature. As for it being a little more funky...I'm not a funky sort of guy.

If anyone remembers the image below they might also remember that London Drugs used it on their photo printing website without my permission it had no visible copyright symbol on it, it still doesn't. It was only through luck that I saw it, emailed them proved it was mine and they paid a sum of money for their use of it. They took it down immediately after even though I did give them permission to continue using it.

Copyright is fun.

The company I work for produces very specialised, and very expensive, research reports. They go out as paper copies or electronically.

We know exactly who has bought them. We point this out to folk who start using our info in their corporate literature. A while back, we noticed that stuff was turning up in the literature of US companies when it shouldn't have.

This information was passed to a US government department that buys a lot of our reports. Arses got kicked. Hard. Very hard.

A big "F**K off this is mine" watermark, would help stop people from using it; I say this as I think I would consider a copyright mark such as you mention, to be detrimental to the aesthetics of an image, to such an extent that I imagine it would ifluence my decision to buy or not to buy. I have not seen how you do it, but I can not imagine any visual objects not interacting with the main image in some way. It would certainly make me consider framing methods to hide it. This just goes to show how influenced we (or maybe just me) are by cultural standards as I would accept, say a signature or even an edition counter.

How did you prove it?

Sent them the link to the website that they pilfered it from and told them I was prepared to send them a copy of the original with all the exif information in tact telling when the image was taken type of camera used and all the relevant settings.

When they looked on the website they decided not to fight it and I needed no further proof.

As for copyright on the image I always choose colors for the text close to that area of the image so it does not stick out like a sore thumb. It is quite subtle.