faqs

Copyright is a form of protection provided by U.S. law to authors of “original works of authorship,” including photographs, from the time the works are created in a fixed form.

For photographs, a copyright holder enjoys the following rights:

• Prepare derivative works based upon the work

• Distribute copies of the works to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership

• Display the works publicly

• Authorize others to exercise these exclusive rights, subject to certain statutory limitations.

The copyright in a work belongs to the author(s) who created that work. Only when two or more authors create a single work with the intent of merging their contributions into inseparable or interdependent parts of a unitary whole, the authors are considered joint authors and have an indivisible interest in the work as a whole. By contrast, if multiple authors contribute to a collective work, each author’s individual contribution is separate and distinct from the copyright ownership in the collective work as a whole.

“Works made for hire” are an exception to the general rule for claiming copyright. When a work is made for hire, the author is not the individual who actually created the work. Instead, the party that hired the individual is considered the author and the copyright owner of the work. Whether a work is made for hire is determined by the facts that exist at the time the work is created. There are two situations in which a work may be made for hire:

1. When the work is created by an employee as part of the employee’s regular duties, or

2. When an individual and the hiring party enter into an express written agreement that the work is to be considered a “work made for hire” and the work is specially ordered or commissioned for use as a: 1) compilation; contribution to a collective work; or part of a motion picture or other audiovisual work

For works created on or after January 1, 1978, the term of copyright is the life of the author plus seventy (70) years after the author’s death. If the work is a joint work with multiple authors, the term lasts for seventy years after the last surviving author’s death.

While the U.S. Copyright Office permits an author to register a single work, we strongly advise against registering single images. The U.S. Copyright Office allows for group registrations of up to 750 individual photographs.

To register a copyright claim in a particular group of photographs, you will need to identify whether the photographs are “published” or “unpublished.”

For copyright purposes, a photograph is published on the specific month and year that a copy or multiple copies of the work are made available for copying, sale, or further distribution for the first time. Some easy examples of publishing photographs include: sending a gallery link to a client of the images from a shoot, or posting images to your social media. Generally speaking, if you have made your photographs available to anyone but yourself and have not placed restrictions on the individual(s) with whom you have shared the photographs, the photographs have been published.

The U.S. Copyright Office Group distinguishes between group registrations for published and unpublished photographs. Group registrations must include all published photographs or all unpublished photographs.

Up to 750 individual photographs may be registered together as long as they meet the following requirements:

• All of the works in the group must be photographs. Other works may not be combined with photographs for group registration.

• All of the works in the group must either be all published or all unpublished. A group registration may not contain both published and unpublished photographs.

• The group must include no more than 750 photographs.

• All of the photographs must be created by the same author.

• The copyright claimant for all the photographs must be the same person or organization.

• The group of photographs as a whole must have a title.

There is one additional requirement for registering a group of published photographs:

• All of the photographs must be published within the same calendar year, and the application must specify the earliest and the latest date that the photographs were published.

In order for our firm to register your images, we require an uncropped, low resolution (72 dpi, 500 pixels wide, JPG format) digital copy of each photograph. We also require the following supporting information for each photograph:

1. Title. The shorter the better. The U.S. Copyright Office limits the number of characters an applicant can enter for image titles. The longer your titles, the greater chance we will have to break up your images into multiple subgroups in order not to go over the character limit. Note: titles which include dates of capture in the format are especially helpful (“20250316_house.jpg,” for example).

2. Publication date. The month and year the photograph was made available for copying, sale, or further distribution for the first time. Note: publication date and capture date are frequently but not always the same.

We also need your up-to-date contact information, including mailing address so the physical copy of the Certificate of Copyright Registration will be mailed to you.