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Preventative

While this site is dedicated to helping photographers fight back against copyright infringement, we would be remiss if we did not spell out some things that you can do to preemptively try to keep it from happening in the first place.

1)The first thing you can do is watermark your images. And not with just any watermark, but a "banner" watermark. This can both add to the photo artistically, and makes it harder for a thief to remove. They could never clone it out. They would have to crop off a large portion in order to remove it.

Here is one way to make a banner watermark in Lightroom.


2)The next thing you can do is to make sure to add your copyright info into your IPTC information embedded into the photo. You can do that via Lightroom or Photoshop.

In Photoshop, simply open the photo then click on File>File Info. This will pull up a pop up window allowing you edit and add in copyright information.

In Lightroom simply add in copyright info by selecting the Develop module and scrolling down to the Metadata section.


3) Next thing you can do, is turn off right click copying on the website you are using, or photo sharing site that you are using. Like Flickr or SmugMug. Not all of them have a means to turn off the download feature, but you should look for it anyways.

4)Finally, since the FBI has included this type of piracy into the type of things that they track, you can let would be thieves know by adding in the FBI warning seal into your website somewhere. I am thinking the footer would be best. They have made that available to you here. Don't download the image you see below. You must download it at the link in order to check off that you have read the terms and conditions.

Next you should include a version of the following statement next to it: The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of a copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by fines and federal imprisonment.

The whole thing should look like what you see below.