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Copyright Registration

work for hire photographers. Graphic artists run. Don't walk from evil unless you are really having trouble making bank on a given month. You need to really think about work for hire. Because if copyright is relevant to you, if copyrights important to you, if you do work for hire, you don't own it. Now, if that's okay with you, more power to you. But if you intend to control the right of your work to be reproduced, displayed, exhibited derivative works from your work and you do a work for hire agreement, you're out of luck. No, I rely on work for hire agreements with my assistance, so I'm not gonna hire anybody that won't sign it. But you know I where I'm at in my career, I'm gonna license my work. I'm not gonna I'm not gonna do work for hire agreements. I mean, I'll negotiate a license, but I won't negotiate. Negotiate away my copyright makes sense to everybody. All right, let's talk about some exceptions on when we can use things. Fair use. Uh, that should be over there. Fair use. Th...

ere's this concept that we can't control every little bit of our work that a limited reference to it for certain educational purposes or a limited passing reference to it is not an infringement. It's a case by case fact based analysis. Everybody that gets sued for infringement. Their lawyer's gonna include the fair use defence. It really depends on the facts. Just cause you say fair use doesn't mean it was fair parody. Um Man magazine. Anybody remember Mad magazine made its living bread and butter off of making fun of things that were copyrighted, things that were trademarked. I mean, they made fun of it. There were stickers when I was growing up of they take brand names and turn the names around into something gross. I don't remember what they were called. There's a little trading cards that you'd collect. That's parody. The other thing is things that are editorial or newsworthy. If you're going to take a work and and use it to to to make an editorial point like on an editorial page of a newspaper, there's an editorial exception. There's a limited non commercial education exception on and again, there's this concept now that we can use thumbnails of your images on the Google search engines and where they're small enough, and they're really not reproducible that that is not a copyright infringement When they take our images in the search indexes, uh, put them put, make thumbnails of them and put them out on the Web. Okay, so one more time I'm driving this point home. What's your copyright? It's the right to reproduce it. Let's reproduce me. Copy to copy it to display it toe hanging in an art museum, hanging in a home to hang it on the street to make derivative works from it to change it somehow, to improve upon it, to to to draw from it and make other things to distribute and license it, sell it and transfer it and again to pass it to your heirs. Listen, there's two things that are certain death and taxes. And when you die, your property gets passed to your heirs, either in a will or through and test to see or in a trust, and that those things that get passed to your heirs include the copyright to all of your images. Sculptures, graphic art, paintings, music, all of those things that we has creatives make. They're gonna go to our ears and you know what they affect your federal estate tax because they're worth something. So you need to think about your copyright and how it affects your estate plan. The copyright does exist when the work becomes fixed. Okay, so the copyright is created, but you don't have the right to sue for infringement unless you register it. Look at me and my good eye. What that means is, is the copyright does exist when the work becomes fixed, But I don't have the ability to actually file a federal copyright infringement lawsuit unless and until it's registered, I might be ableto file a state law claim for an injunction. I might be able to file ah conversion claim for stealing it. I might be able to file some other kind of claim to get them to destroy the cereal boxes that my client my copyrighted images printed on. But I don't have the right to bring a true copyright infringement claim unless it's registered. Registration is what's gonna give me my protection in my statutory damages, statutory damages air this concept that a willful infringer that infringes on my work owes me up to $150,000 plus my attorney's fees. Now my work, sadly, is at a point where it's worth much more if it's infringed than it's worth. If it's not in French, I am not selling my prints for $150,000 a piece. Okay, think of a Peter lik, uh, print. I think his lithographs air going for 6 to $20,000 apiece or something like that. He's still worth mawr infringed than not in French. Perhaps not for an original, but there are very few folks whose worth whose work is worth mawr prior to infringement. So that is Onley available if it's registered. Okay? And if you're infringer has insurance. Oh my. Please call me if if you get in French, my phone needs to be ringing. And I've talked to a lot of you out there that have been infringed, and we've taken a look at a lot of cases and wave found some solutions. So here here are the benefits. It creates a public record of your work, its prime a facial proof of the validity if it's registered within five years of publication, or, um, within five years of creation, you get statutory damages and attorneys fees of its register. Within three months of publication, you get ice. That's immigration and Customs Enforcement protection against the importation of infringing copies. Good for your life. And if you don't register, it's like going into a gunfight without bullets. It's like having a burglar alarm that you never turn on. It's there for you, but it's not going to do you a bit of good when it hits the fan if you don't register, all right. And you know, the other thing is, it helps you sell your product. You know why somebody needs to pick me instead of Jim back there? You know why, Jim? My work is published in the Library of Congress because I have sent the Library of Congress copies of my work and my work lives in the Library of Congress. Does yours, Jim? That would be no, but it will. After today. Yes. There's everybody is going to register some work today. It is, uh, Craig, is there a limit when I go home and I start copyrighting on my stuff and sending its flavor of whatever you can get uploaded in 60 minutes and you can have multiple 60 minutes sessions used to have to start a new session when it's over, but they only let you use their I mean again. This is government technology. I don't have a lot of positive things to say about it. It's slightly better than healthcare dot gov. Like I said earlier, but it's it's Ah, it was built by the lowest bidder, so but they didn't used to have the e c o E copyright and, you know, and he had to send it in all on disc, so it's better than it used to be. Great thing. And that was a question from one of our regulars. Pro Photographer. Thanks. All right, So, um, what does when we have to do it? If it's published on the website an album, if it's made available to the public, you have to do within 90 days of publication. There's a little grace period. If it's non published, it needs to be done before infringement, or at least within five years. Published Means is it is it presented to the public, and if it is, then you have to send in two best additions, and in generally that's more of ah, high rez version of it that it is better than what we're going to send in for the unpublished works. So when we register today, I'm assuming we're gonna be registering some unpublished works. Zoe, did you have a question to what happens if, um say I had pictures published in magazines and I did not register within 90 days. Then you go on my website. Your outlook. Okay, So if there have been on my website for more than 90 days, well, you can still register them, and it does give you some protection, but the statutory damages in the, uh you wouldn't be eligible for the statutory damages. What does that mean? The 150 grand Or if it's a non wilful infringement, its third up to 30 grand. It's a big It's a lot of money. Minimum $750. Fair enough. Ah, The other question was say you have a bride who is making her own prints of reproducing things. Obviously, you're not gonna bring the 150,000 lawsuit on her, would you? I mean, okay. I mean, I might Yeah. If I have licensed it to her and she's infringing, I might have My lawyer sent her a letter saying, Look, you've infringed. It says in your contract, you're gonna pay 15 times the normal rate. Craig normally charges 3 50 or 500 for a rights disc 15 times. That is $7500. Please send me a check. We won't file suit for 30 days. We'll give you some time to send that in. Have you ever had to do that? No. No, I have it. Um, but we'll talk more about that later. Uh, registration is easy and cheap. It's 35 bucks online. We're gonna do it today. 50 bucks. On paper, you can register annually if unpublished. Or, you know, about every three months. If you're publishing, we do it online. I'm gonna show you how all right, um, that we're getting ready to register, but I want to come back to this concept of is registration worth it because there's still folks. Probably in the chat room, that air saying Well, you know, I just don't have time to do it or this. This sounds like an awful lot or nobody will ever steal from here. I don't care. I just want everybody to see my pretty pictures and like them, and my blood pressure goes up and I feel so good about myself every time I see a like like, like, that really must mean they like me, right? And that's really what I want. And so I'm not worried if people steal it. Okay, that's one way to look at it. I mean, you can't say that's wrong, I suppose, Uh, but is copyright relevant? I'm gonna ask that question again. And if so, now that we've talked about it, why is it relevant? What you guys think? Well, this is your business, your livelihood. If you don't protect it, you're opening yourself up to problems. Is we heard at the beginning that photographer salaries are going down since 2010? How has our reputation in the service industry what people think of photographers? Are we mawr or less respected in the digital age than perhaps we were 10 years ago? I don't think it's less, respectively, for the simple fact that every anybody can actually go out and by a quote unquote professional camera and say, Hey, I'm a photographer and, um and then on top of that probably customer service is going down for these people who want, quite, you know, quote unquote professional photographers. So is like everybody's getting a bad rap whether you have ah, guy with a camera or a girl with a camera in So the G W c Yes, I have an actual abbreviation. What? Um, is there any chance that holding your clients like the beer examples away of the bride holding them accountable to the license that they agreed upon? If you did see them, could that turn out kind of go against you in terms of bad PR being the photographer, that was a stickler. Or do you see any negatives in holding this up? Well, I think possibly. But when you have a conversation with your clients about how important it is at the beginning and you tell them I'm serious about this and you get a license and you get to do this and kind of eye view that very seriously, I don't think a bride would like it anymore. If I came into her home and took her jewelry, then she'd like that. I'd like it if she took my disc, which I would have sold to her mother if her mother wanted to buy one for $500. Okay, her mother wants to discuss. She knows when she signed my contract. She may not give this to her mother. It says it and she takes that disk. She gives it to her mother, and now her mother's Facebook page has every one of her daughters images in it. I pretty much know what happened, right? Okay, so when that happens, I might approach the bride and do one of two things. Ask the mother to take it down, Ask for $500. I haven't gone to the 15 times yet, but I might ask her to pay for it. And that's worked well for me a couple of times. We ask him to pay what I normally would have charged to sell it to him. And clients are is unfamiliar with copyright, as photographers are equally so, I'd say, and they just don't understand it. They didn't understand they couldn't do it. And so when asked, oftentimes they're very willing to pay for it, and you try and do it professionally without embarrassing them in depending on their reaction, that kind of accused me as to how I How I want to take it from there makes sense. Yeah. Thank you. Tatiana wants to know. Can you recommend some reliable resource is on similar questions pertaining to copyright laws in Canada. And we had a few internationals guests as well. Online. The Berne convention is the International convention or treaty on copyright registration. Canada is is an interesting place for copyright. In many respects, it's a little bit better than the United States and that they don't necessarily require registration. I'm not sure of any specific sources that I'd send her to for a Canada discussion. Um, story. No worries. Thank you. I want to do here again. If I had my PC, I'd have lots of USB ports, but And Craig, Misty would like to know, Do you register all your 600 images from a wedding? Or do you only do your favorites? Uh, all of them. We're gonna do a whole wedding right now. Cool. I won't have my right click. What do you apple people say? That's command click sample control. Click for the right. All right. Look at this. Here we are copyright dot gov everybody loving it. Do you see where it says E CEO, log in. Everybody have their pictures ready. Drum roll. But I got something to register. Look, I've been $35. pixels wide, correct? Yeah, Mine are gonna be a little bit different, but we'll talk about that. Um okay, here's what I did. Here's a pdf. And I used Adobe Acrobat. No, I used bridge CS five to make this. They've got over on output on the output section of Adobe Bridge is you could pick contact sheet. You can pick how many rows and columns or whatever and then use to navigate over here and highlight it, and you pick 72 d p. I and I think this one you kind of fiddle with it, but they has to be. Has to be high enough resolution, so you can see if somebody infringed on you. But this is Ah, pdf, um, if I knew how to zoom in on it, usually command Plus yeah, look at that. You go. OK, so, um, could somebody tell this is just the whole wedding. It's a good the bad and the ugly. If somebody was ripping off my picture somewhere, maybe here, Uh uh I see this thing pop up on in a magazine or I see this pop up in a magazine and I see this pop up in a magazine. These bride magazines are the worst. My local vendor would created an ad piece to market to photographers, and they included me in my studio on it on a 1811 sheet trying to sell and space. They took me my picture in one of my client pictures that they take took up my website and they centered around all these other photographers trying to get him to buy an edge a nad advertorial that would have looked like this. I didn't get many permission to do that. So could I have talked. Told that that was my image, if I would have gone to the copyright office and downloaded this and took take a look. A You know this image? Sure. So this has Oh, my gosh. Um one me. See how many pictures we're going to send in the copyright office? 1362. We're gonna do it all the same time. This is 20 four megabytes. It's 65 pages long. It's a contact sheet. Welcome to the digital revolution. Um, we used to make these with 35 millimeter negatives, but we don't do that anymore. Unless you're in photo school, right? Or art school. Uh, so what do we do next? Let me navigate back to my fire Fox. And here we r e CEO law again, if you are, Um, uh, at this page, click on the E CEO, telling me understand it's a protected computer and continue todo my session timed out. But it's still loves me, and I'm sure will let me have another chance to do it again. Maybe. Okay, now there I am. Okay. I have a user I d If you're a new user, police click on new user. At this time, I'm gonna go ahead and enter my existing log in. Craig, when you're copyrighting these air, you copyrighting them as the individual photographer or as your business. I've done both ways. Um, I normally it's individual photographer is the way you should do it. Individual photographer. So here we are. And this is what comes up on the dashboard. I'm gonna give everybody just a minute. Teoh, Take a look at that. If we click on working cases. I created one last night Creativelive wedding collection. It's got everything on it. And then when I got to the end, you can save how you do. It is a template, So every time you come back, you log in and you can reload your template. And it will answer all of these questions and put in all of these addresses for you, and you just have to go through and verify it's still correct, so you can speed up the registration time by about 50% by doing it the first time and then saving it as a template before you submit. It makes sense really quick. Craig A few people. The copyright dot gov isn't totally clear is that $ per image or $35 per hour of uploads unlimited $35 per upload crap. Let however many you can send in, however many one hour sessions you want to have. You can send him a 1,000,000 if you want to use to have to keep doing 60 minutes sessions. Okay, a couple of key points. Technical people look at me and what good I Mac users I would have had my PC appear today, but an evil force conspired against me to prevent its successful implementation into the creativelive workflow. You may not use safari. You must use Microsoft, Mozilla Firefox. And when you use Mozilla Firefox, the first thing that you need to do is go to the file. Ah, at it Firefox preferences. And then, once in preferences, you need to turn off the pop up blocker. It will not work unless you turn off the pop up blocker. So that's Baier Fox preferences Pop up blocker. It's under the content tab content Tab Papa blocker. All right, enough technical support back to the registration. So let's have Let's do ah, new new registration register. A new claim. Here we go. Um, I am registering one work, one song, one poem, one photograph. Say no. The work was created by one person. Say yes. The copyright in the work is solely owned by the person who created it. Say yes, and then we start the registration. Now. Do not use your browser's forward or back button or utter destruction and mayhem will result. You must use the government's buttons. OK, so let's go ahead and open this up. Craig, Can the files be zipped to make upload Go faster? Yes. Zip. Yes. Great. Zip away. Simple way. Thank you. They're thinking so creative. Okay. What are we registering? A literary work. Sound recording. What? What is this? This is a work of the visual arts, and you can click on it if you want to know what the definition is. But for type of work, pick work of the visual arts for a picture. It's a book s so forth. And so click Continue. You need to stop. Make sure you click the safer later button. Give the title. Exactly is it appears. Um, you can create a new title. I like to say we will call this. Um um the title is I'm gonna call it. This is just for our right. It doesn't matter what you call it. You could call it anything that you wanted. This wedding I don't remember which wedding this Waas Alcorn Alcorn wedding 2013 Sound good. Save you can call it untitled. One entitled to etcetera. Doesn't matter. Continue The next screen that will come up hopefully will allow us to give some more information. The next batch of information we're gonna be entering pertains to owns it where we want the mail sent. If we transferred the copyright to anyone else in things like that, I see the little blue circle valiantly orbiting. And here comes actually, the bandwidth is probably being all sucked by healthcare dot gov dot gov today at the government, and they've got somebody on it. I'm sure it will be a few congressional hearings as to why my connection is slow. Has this work been published? What's the answer? Creative Leiber's? No, no. The year What did I tell you? Waas 2013 There's no pre registration numbers to just skip that and click. Continue. Uh um the name of the author. Now, since we've already logged in, all you have to do is magically click the add me button and me. There I am. It asked me about my citizenship. I'm gonna pick us. It's gonna ask me where I live. I'm gonna say us, and that's good enough. Click save. Um, author created what? One of my one of my submitting photographs save. Continue. Uh, identify the copyright claimants. Click. Add me. Puts me in again. Now, if I had transferred this to Apple Studios. I would list Apple Studios is the claim It I'm just gonna go ahead and register this in my own name because I haven't done a copyright transfer for Apple Studios. I Craig was the one that pushed the button on the shutter. Or my assistant. I'm saving it. There's a button moving around in a little circle. We're almost to the end. Uh, after you pay, then we'll have the opportunity to upload. So upload happens after we pay. Not very daunting, is it, Jim? So far. Other than waiting for the website to come up here, we go identify the claimants in the work. There I am. I'm just gonna hit the continue button. It's gonna take me. It's gonna ask me whether I am limiting my copyright at all on the next page. See where it says limitation of claim up here. We're not limiting it. So we just hit the continue button that's gonna take us to rights and permissions. I'm not giving anybody any specific rights or permissions with this, so I'm just gonna hit the continue button. If I had granted a license, I might include that there. And the correspondent is just the person that you want. The the actual certificate sent to gonna click. Add me. It will put me in there and then I'll click the continue button takes me to the male. I'm sorry. Now there's the male certificate button and click. Add me again. Continue. Correspondent is who they'd write to or contact if there was a problem. If there were an immediate infringement and Craig wants to sue somebody, we'd click special handling, and we'd pay about 750 bucks, and this sucker would be registered and made overnight the certificate to me because you have to have the certificate to file the lawsuit. Okay, so we're not gonna pay an additional $760. Do not click anything on this page or you will be charged. Click continue homestretch certification. We've got to make some government certifications. We gotta type or name in, and then click. Continue. Okay. Preview all of this. We'll see what happens. Um, how on this fancy computer do I scrolled down? Oh, that's just the down arrow. Rocket science. Um, everything looks good published. No, there's me, uh, no material excluded. no rights and permissions. There's the correspondent. There's who emailed a certificate to. Okay, so this all looks fantastic. I've double checked it. Now. See my save template button right here. Save his template. That's where you click that to save it to use later for an unpublished work. And if you click save template, I'll just go ahead and do that and show you how it works. I'm gonna call this unpublished photographs to I've already got one work of the visual arts, um, and then just hit this little save button and it'll save it and let you use it later. And then it kicks us back to where we were at, and I'm gonna click. Add to cart. Once I added to the car, it, uh I'm ready to pay for it. Um and so I just click the check out button and we can pay with a credit card. I think I'm gonna go ahead and do that. It's gonna take me to another website. That's okay. I want to proceed. It will bring me back. Gonna put your name in Alright union. You can bring it. Bring it up to my away. I think I'm paying with a bank account. I I've clicked the wrong one. Return to your original application. Here we are. Let's check out again. Maybe I just didn't scroll down far enough. Feel free to jump in and give me some technical support. I want to pay with a credit card. A ch right. That's a credit card in it. And most in the Northern Hemisphere anyway, So I'm gonna click that, and I'm, uh, leaving. I'm fine to leave.