| "Imagine this. You are lazily browsing in a bookstore when you suddenly see something out of place. The cover photograph of a magazine on display looks somewhat familiar. In fact, it is a photograph taken by you!
Congratulations. Your copyright has just been violated!" |
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It can be blood boiling when something like this happens. And yet, very few people know what to do. Beyond, that is, calling up the magazine and yelling. The story that follows will focus on how to protect your work—right from registering a copyright to enforcing it.
What is copyright?
First, the legalese. In Indian law, copyright means that creators of literary, dramatic, musical and artistic works (which is where photography is placed) enjoy an exclusive right to reproduce, publish or further adapt their work. In other words, you have the sole right to reproduce any photograph of yours as many times as you like, share it with the public, hire it out, or even sell it. No one else can. Not without your permission, anyway.
That is pretty water-tight. Praveen Dalal, an advocate at the Delhi High Court, believes that the Indian Copyright Act, 1957, is one of the strongest copyright laws in the world. Quite a lot of the problems we see, he says, is because photographers are unaware about their rights, and do not litigate even after an infringement is established.
Having said that, it is important to understand here that the law doesn’t protect the idea behind the photograph – it only protects the expression of that idea, which is the photograph itself.
How do you copyright your images?
There are three ways of going about it. One, you do nothing. Because a copyright comes into being automatically when your work is created.
Two. You register it. Proper documentation that traces the parentage of an image back to you makes it simpler to fight a case if the need arises. The problem, however, with the process of creating that Fort Knox of documentation is that it is tedious. Try this. All work has to be registered in the Register of Copyrights maintained in the Copyright Office of the Department of Education in New Delhi. Nowhere else. Then, every image requires a separate application. Which is something that gets ad photographer and chairman of Photographer’s Guild of India (PGI), Atul Kasbekar worked up. Registration of every single image, he protests, is impractical. “Sometimes, you shoot a 1000 images in a day! Imagine sitting and filling up 1000 forms for every day’s shoot.”
Enter, option three. Whenever fashion photographer Vikram Bawa shoots for a client, he creates an agreement which specifies the number of times, and how long, the client can use the images.
Can copyright be shared?
If a photographer has been briefed by, say, a creative director, would the latter be entitled to any rights over the image. After all, the image does have his creative inputs.
The law is not too clear on this point. Chapter I in the Indian copyright law defines joint authorship as “a work produced by the collaboration of two or more authors in which the contribution of one authors in which the contribution of one author is not distinct from the contribution of the other author or authors”. But what does that mean for a photographer?
In an ideal situation, says photographer Rajat Ghosh, an art-director would hire a photographer for his vision. And therefore, the question of sharing copyrights wouldn’t arise. For his part, Adil believes the photographer owns the image. As the law states, you cannot copyright an idea, you can only copyright its execution. And so, whoever triggers the shot owns the shot. Beyond that, it is the photographer’s prerogative to share copyright with the director or not.
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