With our partner Digimarc, ImageSpan is engaged in an ongoing series of educational webinars for prospective new business customers. The latest of these, "Copyright 101, Copyright Basics for Creative Professionals, Media Companies and Content Archives," featured Jonathan Bailey, founder of the website, Plagiarism Today.

Bailey also serves as a consultant, helping Webmasters and companies devise practical content protection strategies and develop good copyright policies.

Below is a summary of some of the points discussed in the recent copyright webinar.

Who should be interested in copyright?
Copyright law today covers a broad range of people including Writers, Visual artists Photographers, Musicians, and Film Makers. It is not only these producers of this content but also the consumers that need to be aware of what copyright is and how it protects the owners of the content. From the classical music composer to the YouTube video amateur, copyright affects all of us.

What does copyright protect?
U.S. copyright protects a number of different works including literary, musical, dramatic, pantomimes, choreographic, pictorial, graphic, sculptural, motion picture and audiovisual, sound recordings and architectural. The copyright process is designed to protect the creator of the content and covers anything that is fixed on a tangible medium (for example on paper, in a digital file, on a painter’s canvas) of expression with a requisite level of creativity. Copyright does not apply to ideas but only to the expression of those ideas attached to a tangible medium.

It is worth noting that copyright eventually expires and, as a rule of thumb, anything created before 1928 is public domain and is not protected by copyright. That being said, copyright for an individual lasts 70 years after the individual’s death and can be passed on like any other asset. Copyright for a corporation is fixed at 95 years after publication.

What rights does copyright give me?
As the name suggests, the copyright owner has the right to copy or reproduce the work to prepare derivative works, to distribute copies, to publicly display or perform and to transfer ownership of the work. It may seem odd that the right to copy or reproduce and the right to distribute are called out separately. But as Jonathan pointed out, it would be common for a school to be given the right to copy or reproduce a work on a limited basis, while a copyright holder retains the right to distribute the work.

Where do I register my copyright?
The U.S. Copyright Office: If you are a US citizen and plan to file suit in the US it is a legal requirement that your work be registered with the US copyright office. Filings cost $35.00 for most works and multiple works can be submitted with the payment of one fee. For each filing, there are to maximum statutory damages. Even if you complete a filing properly and submit it electronically, expect that it will take a minimum of 9 months to receive a copyright certificate. A number of companies will help you assemble documentation to prove that you have submitted a request for copyright. These companies are not official government services but may help in preparing your case for trial. Most cases are settled out of court and do not make it to trial.

What are the best practices when dealing with infringement?
Preparing for and dealing with litigation is a time-consuming and expensive proposition. As mentioned above, most cases will not make it to trial and will be settled out of court.

However, by approaching copyright violation in a calm and strategic manner, you may be able to turn violators into customers. By giving violators an easy way to license your content, and by encouraging the legal use of your content, you are far more likely to achieve a positive outcome than by threatening of legal action.

The bottom line is that copyright is in place to protect you and your assets. It acts like an insurance policy -- should you ever need it.

To find out more, watch Jonathan Bailey's full Copyright 101 presentation and listen to audience questions by visiting our full webinar archive at: http://www.licensestream.com/licensestream2/Portal/knowledge_center/webinars.aspx

Have questions or comments about this blog post? Please feel free to share them by clicking on the "Comments" link below.

With powerful off-the-shelf consumer applications like Photoshop, almost anyone can take an image, crop it, alter, recolor or make a photo composite without too much effort. The question arises, how much “photoshopping” needs to be done for an image to be considered an original work of art?  

 All visual artists at one time or another have probably created art “borrowed” from copyrighted source material. The sample below shows how quickly the face of Mona Lisa and be flipped, altered, recolored and placed into a new background in a matter of minutes. The resulting altered image is pretty believable but is it a “new” original work of art? I don’t think so. If I had created the original portrait of Mona Lisa and came across the “Bearded Lady” version I would likely sue the infringing party for stealing my work.        

Mona Lisa (original) 

Bearded Lady (altered version)

I created this for my personal use but had I chosen to alter an original work in copyright and made the resulting “new” art more visible to the general public, even post it to my Facebook page, I could be accused of copyright infringement. Chances are the copyright police wouldn’t come knocking on my door for creating the new derivative work, but it would not be an original work of art.  

When an artist creates a work of art, the copyright comes into existence automatically and provides the owner with a number of exclusive rights. No registration is required, though it may be necessary to protect some remedies if the artist ever plans to sue for infringement. By the way, registering your content using ImageSpan's LicenseStream does just that because it establishes provenance (history of ownership) of the content.

To qualify as a derivative work, the creation must use a substantial amount of the prior work’s expression. How much? Enough so that the average person would conclude that it had been based on or adapted from the prior work. It’s a common sense thing. Merely borrowing the ideas expressed by the prior work (creating a work “inspired by” it) would not create a derivative work. Ideas are not copyrightable, and a work is not derivative unless it has been substantially copied from a prior work. 

How Different is Different?

For a derivative work to be copyrightable, it must be "different enough" from the original work that it can be considered a new work in its own right. Making minor changes, or adding little of substance to a preexisting work will not qualify the work as a new version for copyright purposes.   

Artists who create collages know they involve combining multiple elements to create a new whole. The important thing to remember is that the changes must be significant. Minor alterations to a single other work might not be "different enough." Unfortunately, the law is rather vague on this point. There's no clear definition of how much is enough, either in terms of a percentage, or square inches.   

Derivative work can only include copyrighted material if it is created by the owner of the copyright for the original material, or with that owner's permission. Making a collage that includes photos from National Geographic, clippings from advertisements, or a famous Picasso painting is illegal unless you have obtained permission from whoever owns the copyright on those works.  

An example we can all relate to...

Most if not everyone has seen the famous pre-election HOPE poster from street artist Shepard Fairey with the red, white and blue illustration of President Obama. What you may not know is that Fairey is now in a legal copyright dispute over the poster with the Associated Press for using photographer Mannie Garcia‘s photograph of Obama as a reference image without getting permission or substantially changing it. One might argue that the new art form is so different from the original photograph that it should be considered original. When art works its way into media -- even for a political statement -- and gains enough exposure to raise the prospect of commercial gain, the issue of ethics and ownership comes to the forefront.  

An interesting note in this case is that the Garcia photo is now more famous and valuable than it ever would have been prior to the creation of Fairey’s Obama poster.  

Also of interest: Fairey found Garcia’s photograph for the illustration on Google Images. In fact, a recent survey shows that more than 60 percent of all images are found via Web searches. With LicenseStream, users can publish their work directly to Google.  

The Last Word

Protect yourself by creating original art that is not swiped from someone else’s portfolio or body of work. Protect your own intellectual property by registering it on LicenseStream where you can also benefit from our tracking capabilities. Our tracking services will alert you to instances where your work may have been misappropriated, and will let you resolve these situations by selecting among several automated responses. Responses may range from a request to license your work, include a photo credit, provide a link back to your site, or even a request to remove it.     

LicenseStream’s Tracker offers another benefit: it enables you to see where your images are being used. This intelligence may uncover new markets for your work, enabling you to forge new marketing strategies and make more effective business decisions.  

The Picture Archive Council of America (PACA) has put some great resources online for anyone who wants to learn about copyright.

Included is a video presentation from PACA counsel Nancy Wolff, a downloadable Copyright Education PowerPoint presentation, PACA's Copyright Commandments, a variety of legal docs.

You can find these and a number of other resources in the PACA Document Library.