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Are you sure you want to copyright that photo of your collectible?
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I have to laugh when I see how some people copyright protect every online photo they post of their collectibles.
Whether it be by way of the Auctiva picture protection service, or some other watermark method, you'll find these photos all over the web, on pictures of antiques and collectibles of which there are thousands of. They guard these pics with the same severity or even more, than they would the item itself.
What possible sense does it make to copyright protect a picture of a Beatles album cover that several million other people own?
Now don't get me wrong, I'm not against copyright protection, it's just that in so many cases it's unnecessary and could even hinder the sale and/or promotion of your item.
First, this article deals with the unnecessary use of photo copyright protection, so if you know that you have a good reason to protect your images, then by all means, do so. Photo copyright protection is needed in some cases, albeit rare ones.
Here are the reasons you may not want to protect your images.
- Your item will not have the chance for exposure from a reporter. I use many photos from online dealers. If the item is for sale, I publish a link to the item sale page, if it's no longer available, I publish a link to the main page. There are thousands of reporters who do the same thing. If I find something I want to write about, and it's image is protected, I'll find a a similar listing with an unprotected image posted, or simply write about something else. In case you didn't know, a link to your Website or selling page from a major online news source provides some pretty peachy SEO.
- Many of the watermarks used to protect images actually distort part of the image, and they just don't look that great.
- Unless you have the image saved on your computer, even you cannot use the image.
Reasons you may want to copyright your photo:
- You are NOT selling it, and want to prove provenance and ownership.
- You think that the photo of the item has commercial value in and/of itself and want to retain the resale rights.
- You think that other sellers will use your picture to sell their item. In reality, this isn't really done as often as you'd think. In many cases it's less time consuming for most people to just take a pic of the item they have than to hunt around the web and find one good enough to copy. If the item is condition sensitive, it's counter productive to copy someone elses photo to sell an item.
Test your antiques knowledge: Can you identify and price the item in the photo below? Click on the pic to see the full online appraisal.
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