Q&A for How to Copyright Photographs

Copyright is granted automatically when the photo is taken, but to register the copyright with the U.S. government costs $55. You can register a bunch of photos at one time for one fee.

You may register them as individual works or under a single title as a collective work.

No. You never need to register unless you're suing in the US, and that has nothing to do with copyright notice, which has been completely optional in the USA since 1989.

Yes, the images can be copyrighted, and no, there is no concern about the government using the images to spy on people.

Website registration is complicated due to multimedia elements, routine or automatic updates to content, and possible diverse or shared ownership, not to mention ownership of the collective rights in the resulting jointly authored site. You may need to sit down with a copyright attorney to lay out your plans.

Copyright ownership is free and automatic. You can file a "takedown" notice for unauthorized photos you find online. You can send "cease and desist" letters to people violating your exclusive rights under the copyright. If you're a US citizen, you cannot enforce your US copyright in a US federal court (i.e., sue people who don't cooperate) until you register your copyright in the USA. Foreign authors are exempt from needing US registration, by treaty.

The instructions on the eCO website list all the acceptable digital formats for your required submission of a copy of your work.

Many "old photographs" in the USA never had any copyright because they were "published" without proper copyright notice prior to 1989. However, it’s always better to check with a copyright lawyer. If there was any copyright on the photos in question, you will want to make sure that it is expired.

If it's a work of the US government, then it has no US copyright. 17 USC § 105 states that anyone is free to duplicate and distribute it, or derivative works made from it. Caution: not all US government works were originally created by the US government, and they may have different copyright restrictions.

No. Copyright always has a finite duration, whether a set number of years from creation or publication, or some number of years after the death of the original author, or some other date set by statute or other events. Copyright for unpublished US works of the 1960s was granted retroactively in 1978: either 70 years after death of author, or 120 years from date of creation for works made for hire or where author's death date is unknown.

No. In theory, you only need to register your copyright on works that you intend to use as the basis for a federal lawsuit. You are allowed to do that at any time prior to filing suit, although you may qualify for "statutory damages" if you register within 90 days of your initial publication or within 30 days of discovering the infringement.

Owning a copy of an image is not the same as owning a copyright on that image. Only the copyright owner has the legal right to create a "derivative work". However, when it is "fan art", many copyright owners do not object to artful use of their works, provided you do not profit commercially from it. You might own the copyright of the "new" parts you added.

It was copyrighted the moment you took the picture with your camera. Posting it online may have given the entire world a limited license to look at it online, but you still own the copyright. If you want to register your copyright and sue someone for violating your rights, you may do so.

Entirely legal, assuming you own the copyright. Copyright registration is completely optional. In most countries you cannot register because there is no registration office because it is not required. Even in the USA, a registration of your copyright is only required when you are preparing to sue someone for infringement.

Technically, no. If they are unpublished works of a US author who died less than 70 years ago, they are already copyrighted, by rule, under the Copyright Act of 1976. If they were published, then a much more complicated set of rules apply. If you want to register copyright for those works, you would need to prove how you happen to own the copyright (i.e., by inheritance).

You can submit photos over multiple years if you file multiple applications for registration.

It depends on whether they own all of the work you produced at work, for them, or on their premises.

No. Under copyright law, the original creator has the rights to the original work. If the image was released by the creator into the public domain, or if the copyright expired, then you can use it. Otherwise, it is best to assume copyright protection.

The owner of the original copyright has the exclusive legal right to duplicate it or to create or authorize derivative works. You cannot "copyright" a work for which you were not the original author unless you have obtained the ownership from the original owners through a documented "chain of title".

Assuming you're asking about how to register or otherwise protect the copyright, only the owners of the copyright of each individual photo, or of the entire collective work, can do that. The laws about copyright duration and ownership can be complicated, having changed numerous times in the past 100 years.

Working this backward: you generally cannot register copyright for something unless you own the copyright. Your father's copyrights (if any) could have been transferred to others (in writing, under US law) prior to his death, or his heirs would have inherited them. More to the point, you would have to figure out whether your father's slides had any original copyright under the laws at the time, or retroactively, according to who he worked for at the time, what country it was in, whether they were published, what sort of copyright notice they had (in the USA), etc. They are either copyrighted (by law) or they are not (by law). Copyright duration also depends upon similar factors.

Under the current US laws and rules, you may submit up to 10 works on one application, and one "work" may be comprised of a portfolio of multiple works, as a "collective work". A typical example of a compilation is an album of songs, or a DVD with a movie, theatrical trailers, soundtrack and audio commentary, provided as a unit. The US Copyright office has a Circular 34 on its website for more info.

You already own your copyright the moment to create an original work of authorship in a tangible form. You may optionally register your copyright ownership in the USA and a few other countries. The US Copyright Office, part of the Library of Congress, can be accessed online at "copyright dot gov"/registration. The fee schedule is at "copyright dot gov"/circs/circ04.pdf. Currently (2018 fees) the single-work online registration fee is $35.