I have several pictures of various stuff in my hard drive (mostly cities and mountain/nature view in the Philippines). I was thinking of uploading them in a photo gallery website where everyone can freely get pictures and use them.

I would love to submit all my pictures to Public Domain, but then I realized one catch.

What if somebody harvest all my pictures and launch his or her own competing website?

So instead of full public domain, I was thinking of retaining some rights to myself. I visited Wikimedia commons and found that their photos are either public domain or GNU Free something (sorry, I'm weak in legalese). When I examined the document, it's really long with preamble and other legal stuff.

My terms are very simple, everyone can use my pics for whatever purpose except for creating another stock photography, photo gallery or photocollection site. It can be stated in just one to three sentences.

So do I have to make an elaborate legal notice like the GNU in Wikimedia or is it enough to express my terms in its simplest form with one to three sentences?

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At this point I don't believe you have to go so far as to create a huge policy and could simply state that the pics can be used for any purpose except for the purpose of creating a site that offers your images for free or for a cost. something to that effect.

someone correct me if i am wrong.

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If I understand correctly, that you are willing to allow anyone access to them, for their own personal use, then I would simply state something like...

"The images on this site are the intellectual property of (insert your name here). Personal, non-commercial use of them is hereby granted, provided that credit attribution is made, to (insert your name and/or link here)."

This is what I would do, but it is NOT to be construed as legal advice, as I am not an attorney.

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Yeah you're corrent. My idea now is to go more or less on your advice, but I'll keep this thread up in case someone else has an idea of proper wordings.

Doc
Actually, I won't even demand or request a credit attribution. As long as people don't copy my pictures to launch similar collections, that's ok with me.

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In that case, you could just chop it off at this:

"The images on this site are the intellectual property of (insert your name here). Personal, non-commercial use of them is hereby granted."

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If you don't want anyone (commercial or non) copy the pics for a similar collection, then, write down a clause in that way. Be explicit.

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I happen to be an attorney and under these circumstances I would suggest that you retain copyright and demand that a user obtain specific permission and provide some sort of form.

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For a small business it's near enough impossible to police. So you can simply relinquish all controll and have a friendly disclaimer outling your usage policy or perhaps add a watermark with your domain.

Big photo sites have legal teams that try to prevent people stealing their photos, but people still do so you'd have a tought time stopping them on your own.

Personally, I'd just appeal to the good in people and take it from there.

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Gareth, in the end it doesn't really matter: Regardless of any copyright notice, people are still going to take whatever they want and use them anyway they please (then you can get cw1865 to help you there, ). And because of the DMCA and "intellectual property rights", anything you put at your website is copyrighted (as I understand it, cw1865?). But it "could help" by putting a copyright notice anyway, it may prevent "some" from taking them if you word it strongly enough citing some laws.

But like I said, remember in the end it's not going to matter. I get both images and proprietary text stolen from my sites (with copyright tags) on a daily basis. The only way to really help prevent this, is to watermark your images. Then they simply can't use them for their own use if your name and domain is across every image....unless they want to spend the time with an image editor trying to get rid of it.

Doing something like this in the example at the right won't work because that line at the bottom can be easily cropped. Something like this (but maybe a bit less intrusive) would be better.

This is interesting.

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The watermark idea is probably a very good one, as you say. Endeavor to keep the honest people honest, because the dishonest people will find a way, regardless.

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That one is NICE! It'll allow you to build your own watermark, and customize the transparency to the images can still be enjoyed, but won't be easily stolen.

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Yes. I wonder if that's only for .php pages and not for .html . ?

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I don't think that would be an issue, Clint, as the .php script will run on the side.

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Yeah, you're right, really nice now. (I don't know about PHP...obviously. )

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For me .I just put a transparent watermark on it.

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And now for the really bad advice: If you don't want it stolen, don't put it on the web. If on the other hand, you just have to let everyone see it, optimize the heck out of it and / or use the recommended watermark script to finish the job of degrading it to the point that it is unusable. Anyone who can make use of, and monetize a site using someone else's low quality images deserves to succeed--it's not the images that will be doing it for them.

As for labeling, if all the content on your page is yours, a single copyright 2009 your name in the footer will suffice as proper notice.

That's for sure! (Not the "bad advice", LoL). The bottom line is that's the only way to prevent it!

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As for wording of attribution notice, you can 'borrow' the salient points in a GNU or Creative Commons statement of similar restrictions/requirements to create your own brief statement along the lines of what you have posted. If you have a lot of images, it might be worth joining one of these 'attribution providers' and use their boilerplate on your pages.

Creative Commons, et al serve to bring attention to creators, collaborators and re-users of intellectual property. That one wishes to donate their work to the public domain with certain provisos is intrinsic in the principles of their approach. Having a CC or other attribution notice certainly goes to strengthening your copyrights.

Hi guys, I'm sorry I wasn't able to visit this forum for sometime. Apparently, the most convenient options are either giving them up entirely in public domain, or hold on the copyrights and have people ask permission from me.

Yes, it's true that people will just grab images from the internet regardless and that cannot be avoided. However, it's possible to minimize them. Many of those people who just download images are merely ignorant on how the internet works and if I go to the copyright route, I can put a javascript that stops the right click. Of course, the more techie people can find ways but at least, I can to reduce the incidences of stealing my pictures.

Now, if I go to the route of giving away everything in public domain, I need to update the site as frequent as possible, perhaps several new images in a day. That way, I can maintain advantage to whoever will try to grab my pics en mass to launch a competing site.

Another option is maybe, I can have both copyrighted and public domain images in the site (they will be labeled properly). That way, if someone launch a competing website, he or she cannot grab all the pics and I can maintain the advantage of having some pics for my own.

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It doesn't take much of a "techie" to press the "Prt scrn" (Print Screen) key on a keyboard. Or to just save the webpage as a .mht file, open it in Notepad, and take out the URL's. Or, save it as "HTML complete" and have the images in a folder. There are ways of blocking the save webpage dialog, but then that still always leaves the print screen key, and also being able to get the webpage from your Temp net files folder.

I think, and the general consensus seems to agree, the best route is watermarking the images.

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