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Hi, I am taking a lot of photos and am wondering what to do with the onea which are semi decent to share. What's the reason for watermarking and how should that be done correctly?
People watermark their images because there is so much copyright infringement online these days. If my image(s) ever show up on someone else's for-profit website or monetized video, you better believe I'm going after them for the $10,000 award for winning a copyright lawsuit for Unregistered material. The award goes way up if the image is registered with the copyright office.
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There's a standard $10,000 award for that? I mean, I have heard of people suing to have unauthorized use of copyrighted material taken down. But I'm not sure how you would expect to actually recover money, unless you could prove a loss which sounds like it would take up a lot more than $10,000 of attorney time. And the award is more if it's registered with the USCO?
In any case, how would a watermark help you win such a lawsuit? If you are actually talking about going to court, where you could prove that it's your work (prior IPTC data, etc...) what does the watermark do?
I'm not being facetious, and I'm not a lawyer, I'm just genuinely interested. Seems like a shame to degrade an image for such a long-shot payday...
The only way to prove that an image is yours then is if you are in possession of the raw footage?Dunno... I had never heard of that before, but I have heard of plenty of cases of people finding their work shared without authorization and getting it taken down, which seems to be a much more likely outcome.
If there was some standard prize of $10,000 for that, why wouldn't everyone just take it? I'll believe you if you have a link or something, but it sounds like an oversimplification of a legal process.
So again, if you don't need the watermark to prove that a work is yours in court, then that's not a reason to do it. The reason to do it would be to discourage unauthorized use in the first place, because the watermark ruins the unauthorized image.
A watermark doesn't prove anything in terms of showing a judge that it's your work. I could stick my watermark on any digital image, it doesn't mean that I can then claim that it's mine in court, right?
The only way to prove that an image is yours then is if you are in possession of the raw footage?