Adding Copyright and Text to pics & Videos

[Robert Rohloff]

I use Pinnacle 11 for my video and have not figured out how to put the copyright on the video. Anyone use this and know how it works to insert the copyright on the video?

 

[Steve Worthington]

you dont need a copyright as you own em in the first place.
We were just talking about this on TVN
Some pretty good info here.
http://www.tornadovideos.net/forum?func=view&catid=11&id=18769

and heres the place to go to get the complete info on the law and so on
http://www.copyright.gov/

 

[Scott Bennett]

For Photo's I am a big fan of Fastone photo resizer it's free and can resize and watermark in batches for upload to the web. You can select an entire directory say watermark and reduce quality by xyz and put a copy in xyz directory using XYZ new name.

 

[Ryan McGinnis]

you dont need a copyright as you own em in the first place.
We were just talking about this on TVN
Some pretty good info here.
http://www.tornadovideos.net/forum?func=view&catid=11&id=18769

and heres the place to go to get the complete info on the law and so on
http://www.copyright.gov/

They always say that when photographers have plumbing questions, they call a plumber. When they have legal questions, they ask... other photographers.

I am no attorney, however, from my own personal experience, I can say the following:

1. Putting copyright watermarks on your images vastly decreases the likelihood they will be infringed. This could be because people don't want to take the time to remove the watermark, though my hunch is that it's because some people (erroneously) think that everything on the internet is free for the taking unless it has a copyright notice on it. If they see the notice, they go "Oh, that's not free. I'd better find something else."

2. Putting copyright watermarks on your images vastly increases your leverage should some knucklehead infringe your photos, both due to the "willful infringement" enhanced damages clause in Title 15, Chapter 5, § 504, and the DMCA.

You don't need to do anything fancy, just put "Copyright 2009 Your Name" or "© 2009 Your Name". The year, of course, changes depending on when you took the image or video. It also helps to add metadata inside the image or video itself that specifies that the image is copyrighted and that it can not be used without license.

Lastly, you MUST MUST MUST register your copyrights with the U.S. Copyright office and you must do this BEFORE your images are infringed, not after.

Do these things and you will be in a very strong position if you suddenly find a company infringing your images or video.

You can find a wealth of information on this topic at http://photoattorney.com.

 

[Darren Addy]

What RAW Converter do you use? If you are a Bibble 4 user, you can get a $10 plug-in called Matty Pro that will do it for you, non-destructively.

UMark Lite is a free standalone windows program and works great. (May require the .NET framework). You can apply logo or text (or logo AND text). One really nice feature of UMark Lite is that you can choose both text color and shadow color. I recommend a strong contrast between them so the letters will be readable whether on a light portion of your photo or a dark portion.

ImageXYZ is another free Windows standalone program (requiring the .NET framework). It gives you more positioning options for your watermark than UMark Lite, and the option of "3D" or "Drop Shadow". However, it appears to make you do your images one-at-a-time, whereas UMark Lite lets you do 50 at a time.

 

[Steve Worthington]

They always say that when photographers have plumbing questions, they call a plumber.

Not always true....lol
I should know, I`m a plumber rotflmao

Anyway, I feel the same way as you thus why all my images have a mark of some kind
Just saves time later down the road.