Copyright: Protection and Registering

Copyright and your works

Copyright has always been a difficult subject. The days of putting your work into an envelope and mailing it to yourself or a lawyer have gone. New and very affordable ways (some free) are available to help you register your copyright or trademark as well as protect your assets, both physical, digital, and visual. It's never been easier to protect your intellectual property. It doesn't matter if you're an author, a filmmaker, content creator, graphic/motion designer, photographer, musician/audio producer (podcasts), there's a good few solutions for you.  Below, I'll outline a few things you can do to protect your copyright.

Digital Media (Graphics/eBooks/Video and Audio)

OK, you have your digital work. Whether your worried about an image, book, or video, or music is shared online. If you have had this happen, you'll know how very frustrating and time consuming it is to find all of your work, issue a DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) Takedown Request for every person. There's many sites that provide a service that does this, but it's very costly, even though you can issue your own for free. Not only that,  if a lot of your content is outside of the USA, where a DMCA Takedown is not a legal method, it's useless in most foreign countries. If you issue one by yourself, you'll mostly be laughed at, whilst the infringer carries on using or displaying your work(s). Many of these are also self hosted, so contacting their hosting company will also land on deaf ears. As is contacting their ISP. Another good method to protect yourself is by using a Digital Watermark. This can also be used in eBooks, images, videos and audio as well as physical/printed products and these can be traced anywhere online, even if your work has been altered/edited or resized. I'll touch on this a little bit later.

Before you do anything, register your works

There are a few sites you can use. Personally, I use SafeCreative. It's a few dollars a month and you can register unlimited copyrights. You can also register a Trademark, if you have one. Which is great, because this is usually a very tedious process, now simplified. Every time you have a new final work and it's ready to be uploaded or published, register your copyright. This proves the initial date of creation as well as you being issued a certificate (online version and a downloadable .PDF) proving you are the 'claimed' author, designer, creator of the work. It's instant and recorded in a searchable copyright database. Registering is very, very easy, and takes about a minute. You'll be asked to upload said work, of which a copy will be stored in case you need this for a legal case. Do note though, whilst there are options for A.I. Generated work, (more on this later) you cannot legally copyright A.I. artwork as it was not created by you, but buy an Artificial Intelligence. 

Once registered, you have proof of copyright. If you have stolen or used someone else's work, they can contest it on your copyright page, so be sure to only copyright your own creations. With this in mind, if you need to issue any Takedown requests you can. SafeCreative can also do this on your behalf as well as other legal options.

What kind of works can I copyright?

Any kind of work, document of file can be registered at Safe Creative, however you must be aware that not all works are protected by copyright laws. According to the World International Property Organization’s Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works copyright include:

• Literary works: articles, tales, novels, essays, posts, electronic pages, etc.
• Dramatic and audio-visual works: movies, animations, theatre, short films, music videos, etc.
• Musical works: musical compositions, phonographic productions, scores, etc.
• Artistic works: drawings, paintings, designs, three-dimensional models, sculpture, engravings,
  lithographies, comics, photography, etc.
• Databases and software (in some legislations): the code (whatever format) and their manuals and related technical documents, graphics and description modules.

More on A.I.

In particular, protecting your images from being scraped online or used for A.I./Machine Learning. Another reason I use SafeCreative is that it has a disclaimer on your copyright that you either allow or disallow the use of A.I. usage of your works. This gives you some protection if you find you cannot OPT-OUT of A.I. learning on certain platforms or sites where your work is used or displayed.

Digital Watermarks and finding your images online

Digital Watermarks are fantastic. I use them on every image I create, sometimes with multiple methods. I will list a few of these, and most of them trawl most of the internet looking for matches of your images. This is done by reading the digital watermarks that are invisibly embedded in your works. One of the best, and one of the founders in this technology is Digimarc. They have been around for a long time. You may be familiar with using reverse images searches via Google or TinEye, but Digimarc and the other services takes this much further. Digimarc embeds your copyright and is used to identify you as the author with a digital watermark. It's invisible and does not alter the appearance of your work. If your image is altered in any way, resized or embedded with another image, the watermark stays intact, this works with the cheapest option that they have. If you can afford to pay more, you can have a plan that will hunt down where your work is used online and it will inform you and give you the URL where it's being used, which is wonderful if your work had been copied, stolen, passed off as someone else's creation, or from leaks or theft or you're suffering from people pirating/selling your works. You can track them down and take the necessary legal action. Digimarc can start at around $99 for the basic package, but if this is a little too much for you, you can use these sites instead. Some give you up to 50 images to protect for free

• Pixsy - This sites has multiple uses. It will monitor your images for use online, you can whitelist where you upload it yourself, but be careful with that. They also offer a Takedown service, but as I mentioned before, this rarely works if your work is hosted outside of the USA. Another useful feature is that they can recover monies from anyone who steals your works where it's a paid product or for damages, especially if the theft or usage costs you money. An example of this would be a print you sell on Etsy, someone stole that image and takes away a sale. You're out of pocket. So you may be able to recover that cost. More information about that here.
• IMATAG - Another Digital Watermarking option with monitoring, where they also trawl the internet for your works. They have a couple of options. One for leaks, which you can use for all of your images, and monitor for yes, you guessed it, trawling the internet for your images. And lastly, Authenticity, which proves you are the originator. SafeCreative is much cheaper for this though, but I'm giving you some options.

Out of all of these options, Digimarc and Safe Creative are the best options. But for those of you who use the Adobe Software, there's an additional option you can use in conjunction with Digimarc and Safe Creative.

Adobe Content Credentials

From the Content Credentials page:

Content Credentials is a new kind of tamper-evident metadata. It allows creators to add extra information about themselves and their creative process directly to their content at export or download. This information allows creators to receive more recognition for their work, connect with others online, and enhance transparency for their audience.

Content Credentials are part of a growing ecosystem of technologies available through the Content Authenticity Initiative (CAI). Adobe, along with CAI members in media, creativity, and civil society, is dedicated to restoring trust online by creating a standard way to share digital content without losing key contextual details such as who made it and when and how it was created.

Alongside the CAI, Adobe co-founded a standards development organization, the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA), to develop an open, global standard for sharing this information across platforms and websites (beyond just Adobe products). Content Credentials is an implementation of this standard.

Where Content Credentials fails

Content Credentials are great, but it does have a few flaws. If you use any Social Media site, they strip out much of the Metadata in your image. So if you use Content Credentials on your image and upload it, it will not store your information. Content Credentials has an option which helps with this where on creating the Content Credential via the Adobe software, your given the change to upload a copy of this image to Adobe's Content Credentials server, where images can still be verified, but as of yet, this is a manual process via their verify page.

A quick mention here about using A.I. Tools via Adobe products. If, for example, you create some artwork and use one of Photoshop's/Illustrators A.I. tools, when you upload your image to social media, it will get flagged as A.I. Generated or A.I. Used. If this annoys you, and rightly so, you can use something like ExifTool to strip out all of the Metadata from your Image. You can either upload it as it is, or pop it back into Photoshop to add your copyright and content credentials back, re-export it and upload it. It will no longer be flagged as A.I. I would also recommend the ExifToolGUI which gives you an interface to work with instead of the command line.

I hope this article helps you protect your works online.