Topic: Image copyright law on photographs to change (international)

[simon bruntnell]

 Dear artist/seller etc a new image law is to be introduced within next few weeks regarding your photographs or any image you create. So if you can enter details into the meta data section of your image, if you know what this is. Or
a simple 'copyright.yourname or your photographer2011 within the file name will help. Do it before you send them out. Anyone any where on the net will be able to use your images if they are considered 'orphans' see this article http://prodig.org/2010/02/14/copyright-in-photos-to-cease-to-exist/

[Anne]

Hi Simon, I understand that the section covering Orphan Images was dropped from the Act at the last minute due to the objections from the industry: http://prodig.org/2010/04/08/clause-43-thrown-out/ which is good news.  :rah:

I've read through the text of the Digital Economy Act 2010 and there is no mention now of it. The intention was to insert the new rules into the older legislation, Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 in Section 116 as 116A, 116B, 116C, and 116D, but that hasn't happened. 

Having said that, we need to be vigilant as this could be raised again in another piece of legislation and slip past us. According to DACS this is the current legal position of photos: http://www.dacs.org.uk/pdfs/factsheet_14.pdf (right click and select Save File As to save a copy to your computer.)

Having said that, marking online images is sensible advice anyhow - for compressed web images such as many of us use for our websites the meta info can be stripped out by the compression process, so a visible copyright mark might be a better option. If anyone wants to add one this can be done fairly easily using software such as Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, etc...  the copyright symbol © can be added by using the key combo ALT+0169 and then add your name or trading name and the year.