Now that the Third Circuit and other courts (and here) are awarding damages when infringers remove photographers’ copyright management information (“CMI”) (which can be your name, your contact information – such as your website or phone number – or a copyright notice), it’s important for photographers to place your CMI on your photos via a watermark and in the metadata of the photo file. Fortunately, there’s many ways to do this:
- Set a custom brush to place your watermark on your photo in Photoshop®
- Place a logo or text watermark on one or hundreds of photos using Mr. Brown’s Adobe Watermark Panel (the tutorial is available at http://av.adobe.com/russellbrown/Watermark_SM.mov) and Photoshop®
- Embed your copyright management information in the metadata of your image using a photo editor
- Place your copyright management information in the photo file using your camera settings
Let me know at photoattorney (at) gmail (dot) (com) if you have additional tricks to easily add your CMI to your photos and we’ll share them with our readers. For example, check this:
“Digimarc is a plugin that comes built in to Adobe Photoshop. You can subscribe to a Digimarc professional account for $99.00 and be able to personalize your copyright information AND they offer a search service, so if anyone uses your image on the web, you can find out. Most people don’t even know what that option does under the Filter Menu!” HT: Michael P. Majewski
“Picasa also has a watermark feature that will add your custom copyright information to the digital images.” HT: Heather Bussing
