Is it pretentious to watermark images for copyright protection?

zorro wrote:
Hello there,

My girlfriend set up a little web gallery of her art work. She has a
watermark on all her images but now she's wondering if people will
think she's being pretentious. After all, she is an amateur and no
one's heard of her in the art world.

We agreed it's legitimate to protect her work, but does a watermark
really make a difference? I saw a lot of web galleries and often
images have no watermark.

And beside the pretention issue, a watermark also spoils the image you
want to show.

1. First off, web phots are relatively small, so have limited
reproduction value (except in other web pages...). Many photo sites
intentionally keep their photos pretty small for this reason. (no
larger than 500 - 600 pixels).

2. Watermarks can be quite discrete, but I prefer none at all.

3. Copyright does not require a watermark, or even a notice on the webpage.

4. It is, however, prudent to put a general copyright notice on the
webpages referring to the images. A reminder to those who don't pay
much attention to rights. (Eg: the younger generation who freely
exchange music/video/software without much care for copyright).

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.. wrote:
On Feb 6, 7:12 am, Alan Browne
wrote:


Though I have not sold a photo for publication I've wondered if
potential publishers consider photos that have been shown on web pages
as still being qualified as available as "first time published"
photos. It seems that this may compromise a photos acceptance as not
before published.


Just looking at the very high quality photography at
http://photo.net/gallery/photocritiq...re_prefs_p= 0
might answer your question. And one fellow there had his photo.net phot
of an eagle grabbing a fish published in Nat Geo as a "write in".

There are many categories of publishing such as news ("scoop", then
freshness [on top of relevant]) counts most. So if it's been published
as scoop, it still has life as fresh [embargoed for a time before
publishing by rivals], then background and archive).

Catalog/stock photos used for advertising and editorial use can have
limitless life and re-usability (depending on terms). (This covers so
wide a range of photography as to defy writing about here).

Fashion photography is a bizarre world of advertising and editorial -
freshness counts, but print-print-print counts even more. Short shelf
life other than rare and exceptional shots/series.

Art may be exclusive, eg: the web version is to advertise it and print
runs guaranteed to be limited to a certain number of copies by the
publisher/artist - or not.

And more, and more, and variations on all.

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-- usenet posts from gmail.com and googlemail.com are filtered out.