2012: Did You Update Your Copyright?

Submitted by Syv Ritch on 4. January 2012 - 6:00

It's the new year, 2012. New year equals new resolutions but there are so many resolutions to forget from 2011. Here's a quick one that you can do right now and make us feel good as photographers, because we are asserting our rights.

Did you update your copyrights? It takes only from 5 to 15 minutes.

  1. In your camera: almost all “pro-summer” cameras and all “pro” cameras have a copyright menu item to set it up. Many “amateur” cameras also have it.

    On the Canon 7D, it's in the Menu → Wrench 3 → Copyright Information

  2. In Lightroom: Metadata menu → Edit Metadata Presets… → from the preset drop down menu, select your current preset and change the © date to 2012, I use:

    ©2012 Syv Ritch — foto-biz.com

    Then either click on Done or from the drop down menu at the top: Save Current Settings as New Preset… I call mine: foto-biz 2012 → click on Done. Don't forget to use it during the import or you can apply it in the Library mode after the import.

  3. Do you have a blog, website, any Word documents, contracts…? Then you should update the year. All my web pages have the copyright 2012 in the meta tag Copyright and in the footer of each page.

Updating the year of the copyright, claims your new photos, it doesn't protect them. To get the “real protection” with a bite, so that you can get penalties against the infringer, you will need to register your photos with the Copyright Office.