Protect Your Photos Using Copyright and Watermark

Recently, we saw how a bloggers content was stolen and published by a newspaper without proper permission or reference! So now everybody is conscious about security of their content. Actually no one can control the Internet but there are some ways by which we can make sure our content retains owners identification.
Best way to protect an image or photograph is adding a watermark to it.
What is a watermark?

Blog’s Content Theft by a (so called)Leading Newspaper

Before you read any further, please make sure you have read this article of “A Wide Angle View of India”.

Yes, You read right. A so called Popular News-Paper stole an Image from a bloggers article.
I could have written about this earlier but I was waiting for Nita (writer of “A wide Angle…”) to get a response from the News Paper (Hindustan Times) who stole a photograph from her article and printed it without any payment, permission or credit. Thats a serious thing. Some people are saying that “its just a photo.” But for a blogger who never tried to gain any financial benefits from her blog even its quite popular, its a serious thing. She works hard for giving her readers insights on different subjects which are socially important in India. She could have earned much money if she wanted to. But No, she is still writing for sake of readers.
Many bloggers have taken the initiative and everyone has written about it. There are many cases like this which need to be raised. If you are one of them, please don’t hesitate to protest.

You can do following if your content is stolen:

• Write to the editor/owner/writer of the website/newspaper/any media (who has stolen the content) and tell them to remove it or ask them to give proper credit (and money if you want).
• If you do not get a proper response, you can complain to Press Council of India. Read their guidelines here.
• Ask blog world for help if you are a blogger. People out there will certainly guide you if you are really facing in-justice.

For Prevention:

• Get a CC (Creative Commons) License for your work.
• Put a copyright notice on your website.
• Try to find out sites who are hot-linking your images which eventually eat your bandwidth.

There are many preventions and these are just basics.

Keep your eyes open and be ready. Constant Vigilance!!!

Update: Till date, The Press Council and other are just ignoring Nita.

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