How to Copyright Your Professional Photos
Are you looking to become a professional photographer? Are you already a pro and don’t know how to truly protect your work legally? Well for $35, you can easily copyright thousands of your photos.
The scary part of the photography business is protecting your work and the fact that so many photographers don’t do it. A simple visit to the US Copyright Office website is all it takes. You have a fully online option, or online/US Mail option [my personal choice, I'll tell you why later].
When you visit the eCO [electronic Copyright Office], you can quickly navigate through the website by creating an account and logging in. You have several ways of sending your VA [Visual Arts] works you created through photography.
Below is a .PDF file visually showing how the process works that is supplied by eCO for download, or you can download my copy so you have a permanent copy you can refer back to in the future. In the PDF, it shows you step by step on how to submit your work.
In the old days, to submit your work for copyright, you would fill out a paper form, burn a CD/DVD with all your photos and mail both with a check to the Copyright Office for $45. The CD/DVD didn’t require the original size of the file, so you could make all the images 2 megapixels to save space on the disc to store more photos.
Today, for $10 cheaper, you can setup the process completely online and upload your photos or choose to mail the disc with the mailer form provided at the end of the process. If you want to register thousands of photos, you better choose to mail the disc. eCO doesn’t have a bulk image uploader on the website, so it would be time consuming and a waste of time to upload them individually. Also, with today’s technology, you can save thousands of your photos on a Dual-Layer Writable Disc [8.4 gigabytes].
So follow the process in the PDF below, and copyright your photos you want to protect. Hopefully you find this article helpful. If you have any other questions, please leave a comment.
Copyright Your Professional Photos
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