It occured to me that many photographers don’t protect their photos. Ok you can’t prevent people from nicking you pics when they are on the web, but at least by putting a notice up you may deter a useful percentage. Rather than adding an ugly stamp across the front of your photos you can also use the photo’s metadata to add a copyright notice.
There are four important fields found in the IPTC section and one of these that I’m going to help you with the legal wording.
1 is Copyright Status…set this to Copyrighted
2 Copyright I put my name…. Peter Bargh
3 Rights Usage Terms… and here’s what I put:
This image is the property of Peter Bargh and protected under UK and International copyright laws. Copying, duplicating, saving as a digital file, printing, publishing in form of media including web, manipulating, transmitting or reproducing without the prior written permission of Peter Bargh is strictly forbidden and would constitute a breach of copyright.
Feel free to copy this and replace my name with yours.
4 Copyright info url…link this to your own site…ideally to a page about your photo copyright. Make sure you add a bit about photos being available, should a potential buyer by looking.
If you use a catalogue program, such as Adobe Lightroom, you can make this, and keywording a much more automated and quick task.
Hope that helps.