"Keith J Chesworth" wrote in message
...
On Sat, 26 Mar 2005 23:05:38 +0000, Chris Tolley
wrote:

On Thu, 24 Mar 2005 22:55:51 -0000, Martin Underwood wrote:

You might want to think about your charging policy: will you charge
the same amount of money to take a new photo as you would to use an
exsiting photo that you took for another customer, for instance?

Well, if I was a customer of his, I would expect that if *I* had
specified which photographs should be taken, and had paid for them, a
process known formally as "commissioning", then *I* would own the
copyright on them, so he wouldn't have the right to duplicate them.

AIUI that is the sickening part of the copyright law.

The copyright stays with the producer of the works, all you have
bought is a licence to use for personal usages. If you want to use
commercially then you need to have that agreed, as with any further
change of commercial use.

Your wedding photos are not yours to copy. By law you have to buy
further copies from the originating photographer. He owns the
copyright and can do what he damn well pleases with it and your
pictures.

When my server is up (presently awaiting a new mb) then I have several
photographic web sites.
Because of my job amongst other things - see www.unseenlondon.co.uk as
an example, which is up ATM, a lot of my material is not obtainable
from anywhere else.
The copyright of all material is mine and remains so. As I have a
strong dislike of the draconican laws in this field I have a waiver on
most of the sites allowing a free licence for personal and educational
use along with a further waiver for the geographical site owners where
they were taken and their employees. I only reserve for commercial use
by others and a chance for attributation by the authors of other 3rd
party private or free web sites.

Someone after my own heart: copyright laws should be there to protect
commercial interests and to "assert moral right" to the creation of the
work. If the copyright owner chooses not to exploit the commercial interests
of his work within n years (where n is a small number) he should be deemed
to have waived that right - copies of the work must be always be available
at cost plus a suitable royalty: this would get rid of the copyright
holder's ability to establish a scarcity value by restricting supply. And
once published, a work can never be "un-published" - which goes back to the
scarcity value thing again.

I'd also like to see the copyright laws tidied up so copyright *always*
dates from publication date, not from the date of death of the
author/creator: that would ensure that all works earn royalties for the same
period of time, rather than works produced early in the author's life
earning disproportionately more royalties than those produced just before
his death.