Electronic Copyright Registration

Everytime you press the shutter release on your camera and take a photograph, you have created a piece of work that is copyrighted. You don’t need to do anything else for the copyright to belong to you – watermarks, writing All Rights Reserved, the © symbol and so on are not necessary to claim ownership of your copyright. From the moment you take the photo, you own the copyright. Exceptions may exist if you are giving away the copyright under a work made for hire type agreement but as a general rule, if you take a photo, the copyright is yours.

Should someone use your work without authorization, you then have the right to sue for damages. There are two basic forms that damages can come in – actual damages and statutory damages. Actual damages are normally quite small, maybe only a couple of hundred dollars. Statutory damages on the other hand can be as much as US$150 000 per image. But, and this is crucial, you can only claim statutory damages if your images are registered with the US Copyright Office. Additionally, a lot of IP lawyers won’t take your case unless your image is registered.

Fortunately, registration is quick, simple and cheap when done online. A fee of US$35 per registration along with online upload of images means that there’s really no excuse for not doing so. You can register multiple images at one time. To get started, head over to the copyright office website, sign up for an account and away you go.

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