Protecting Your Work

I'm not very active on Ipernity, so traffic is slow (you get what you give, as with most things ;-), but the one or two of you that visit my pages now and then, might have noticed that I removed most of my images last night.

Reason: I'm adding watermarks to my work to prevent people from stealing the photos and using them without my consent and without paying me.

Most of my shots are uploaded in 800 pixels width only, so they're unsuitable for use in print medias, so that's taken care of. But I've experienced several times that people have taken my images from Flickr and published them in blogs - commercial blogs with ads paying the publisher, even.

My images both here and on Flickr are clearly marked with "All Rights Reserved", but some people seem to think that anything found on "the web" is in the public domain and free to use.

Its really so easy to find free photos if they're that cheap - use the Creative Commons Search and tick the "Search for Works I can use commercially", and you'll find photos the photographer thinks its ok to use as long as you credit him or her.

I, however, prefer to sell my work or not seeing it published. (I might let people use my images if they ask and it sounds OK, but I never give away photos to commerical publications, and I never let people who publish my work without asking use them.)

I've started watermarking my most "interesting" images on Flickr, I will probably import some of them back here in due time. I'm sorry for those of you who've left comments on some of the photos I've deleted, but I just can't let the images I've watermarked on Flickr still be available without protection here.