Copyright: do you know anything about it? There’s a big lawsuit against OpenAI and about how they’ve used torrents to get a ton of copyrighted material to train their AI. As time goes on, it’s getting more and more fascinating to watch. But I keep wondering why photographers can’t band together like this and why it’s so hard for people to understand piracy, copyright, and fair use.
Here are a few things that photographers should know about their copyright and copyright in general to protect themselves:
- If you put something on social media, you’re agreeing that you own the copyright to it but you’re surrendering the usage rights.
- Copyright is attributed to someone on the creation of the image. It’s one of the reasons why we’re so big on content credentials being more important for camera manufacturers.
- Re-read those previous two statements, do you want to always ensure that your copyright can’t be protected?
- You really should register your images for copyright with the government.
- The safest place to have your images are on your own website and with AI bot blockers in place.
- There are ways that you can prevent screenshotting and right-clicking of your images on your own website, and you can surely look into these.
- Everyone wants your work, but no one wants to pay for it because they all think that all you do is push a button. And the truth is that many of you pretty do just do that.
With all this said, it is up to you to protect your work and to then therefore protect photography for all of the rest of all. All of us have to do our part or else big billion dollar companies with a lot of tech will get all of us.
Don’t believe me? Look at what’s happening with Spotify and AI music right now.