I've struggled with various copyright issues over the years. My day job has bumped up (run over?) these issues repeatedly, as the digital world is pretty much at direct odds with traditional copyright laws. Even before I was a "real" digital media person, I had problems with students not properly crediting images in their web projects. This was back in the early days of the web (late 90's), and I had my own guidelines that I insisted my students follow.
My rules were pretty simple and I think sensible. You can use an image you "find" on the web, but you *must* give credit to the source (ideally the person who shot it), and you must list the url in your bibliography. Of course this isn't perfect because often the person who took the original shot is unknown, but in any case one does know where they saw the image. The other problem is that urls are temporary beasts, so in many cases you lack permanence in your reference. But until we figure out a way to create persistent metadata that follows rich media, its is the best you can do.
So specifically these days I wonder whether or not to watermark my images that I post online, and if so, how? For stuff I post on the blog I don't watermark as I assume that a 444px wide image isn't going to be of much commercial use to someone (but if it is, I want a cut ;-). However when I post higher res images (ie above 800px wide), I start to wonder. While trying to avoid ego and hubris, the reality is that others have said that certain images I take are "good" and worthy of commercial application (or are "art" - often two completely different animals). So how do I "protect" my work? Or should I protect it? Isn't art for putting out there an sharing? Of course that is part of why I do it, but the flipside is that it isn't really fair if someone makes money off of something I create unless I give them permission to do so..
So now I've defaulted to putting a small watermark in the bottom right corner of larger images that I post in highly "public" forums (like this). People could likely crop it off, but I hate to completely ruin an image with the watermark over the middle of it. At some point it becomes a question of...well...what is the point?
There's a research project in here...
