This page will be covering what to look out for when working with images and other works that aren’t you own. This also applies to the work that you produce and is something you need to understand when entering the world of professional photography
First of all, what exactly is copyright?
Copyright in photography means that you own an image you created. The law says you created that image as soon as the shutter is released.
The photographer who pushed the button owns the copyright. A photographer will own that copyright throughout their life and 25 years afterwards.
Whether it’s photography on your hard drive, online portfolio, or a post on your Instagram feed, with this ownership, you have exclusive rights to your image according to the Copyright Law of the United States of America. This includes:
- Reproducing your photography
- Preparing derivative works based on your photography
- Distributing copies of your photography to the public (by sale, rental, lease, or lending)
- Publicly displaying your photography
Owning the copyright on your photography doesn’t require any special paperwork, or having the © associated with your image. The copyright will automatically apply once you post your photography online because at that point, it exists in a “tangible medium.” It’s out there, and it’s yours.
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Generally speaking, in the UK copyright in images lasts for the life of the creator plus 70 years from the end of the calendar year of their death although the length of the copyright period will depend on when the image was created. That means that images less than 70 years old are still in copyright, and older ones may well be, depending on when the creator died.
An image might have multiple copyright owners if there was more than one creator. An example might be a cartoon or illustration created by a number of visual artists, who then jointly license use to a website owner. This is different from copyright works which contain other, underlying works which are also protected by copyright. For example, if you wanted to use image ‘A’ which also contains image ‘B’, then you would need permission from both owners of image ‘A’ and ‘B’, provided the inclusion of image ‘B’ was not purely incidental.
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