I don’t like visible watermarks on photographs. It so often spoils the enjoyment of photographs particularly where they are repeated at intervals across an image or are particularly large. Even where they are added in a reasonably sensitive way – as on the Demotix site which I contribute pictures to – for example this recent story about the Sharia Law related demonstrations in Whitehall or on other commercial sites, they sometimes just interfere too much with appreciating the pictures.
But increasingly I’m finding my work being used without permission or attribution on blogs and web sites, though unfortunately so far seldom on the kind of site it would be profitable to take legal action against. Usually when I point out the problem I get an apology and a timely and appropriate response – removing the image or adding a link if it is the kind of non-profit acceptable use I’m happy to allow.
Most of the people who misuse images seem to do so out of ignorance. They search on Google Images, come up with a suitable picture and assume that because Google can use it so can they (despite what the site actually says.) We do have a lot of education to do about intellectual property rights.
Until fairly recently we didn’t realise the importance of image metadata and many web sites and web tools for preparing images simply stripped out any present to slim down image files as much as possible. In the days of dial-up connections, it paid to keep your sites clean and mean. Now it’s long past time to get rid of such systems – still around on some major sites – and everyone should now realise that removal of such information from files is an offence.
As a photographer I didn’t realise how important metadata was to me until relatively recently – perhaps around five years ago. Naively I assumed it was enough to just put a copyright statement on every web page, and metadata was then pretty obscure technology and time-consuming to add, even if you had software that could handle it.
Things have changed. Lightroom now adds my copyright data automatically from a preset to every digital image I take and import (its also there from the camera, but hard to find software that understands those notes.) My Epson scanner software currently doesn’t have this capability, which I think is a major failing that they need to address.
The threat of orphan works legislation still looms over us here in the UK, despite the valiant efforts of some photographers (see New Thinking on Copyright) and our problem is that it does not only affect photographers. Some of the other groups with an interest in the matter were quite content with the proposals that were defeated, and I’m at all not convinced that we will get a satisfactory end result.
The watermark shows up well on the brown river water
So one of the things that I’ve changed as I moved to Lightroom 3 is to update my output settings for files to include a copyright watermark for all images I will put on the web. I’ve made it small, not very noticeable and in the bottom left corner of every picture. Although it isn’t always very readable, I think it is always fairly definitely present and hard to entirely miss.
But not as well on some lighter images – though it’s still definitely there
It could easily be cropped off, although I think most people would realise they were doing something wrong if they did so. And I hope few of my pictures work quite as well with the bottom missing.
Actually, certainly when looking at a number of amateur sites, there does seem to be some kind of rule which applies, stating that the more prominent the watermarking the less the pictures are worth looking at (or stealing.) So I’m happier than mine are not too intrusive, though it might perhaps be nice to use one that automatically inverts the tone of the surrounding pixels in some way to produce dark print in light areas. I can’t at the moment see how to achieve this in Lightroom – unless someone has produced a plugin for it.
