The Orphan Works disaster and one way to hopefully keep your images from becoming orphans

The Orphan Works legislation is something that every creative person needs to be concerned about. The bills that have been presented to Congress and the Senate are of particular concern to photographers. In a nutshell the Orphan Works legislation will make a mockery of your constitutional right to own, maintain and profit from your creation. It’s called “Copyright.” You, as the “author” of your photographs, have the sole and exclusive right to lease and distribute your images as you see fit. The proponents of the Orphan Works Bill(s) state that there are thousands of images available where the author is unidentifiable and therefore unable to approve (either for a fee or not) or disapprove the use of these images. Proponents feel that they should be entitled to use the images when they cannot find the rightful owner after a “reasonable” search. The Bill(s) also severely limit the damages that you can claim in the event of unauthorized use. The limitations would essentially void any benefit to registering your images with the copyright office. The intent of the Bills is admittedly different, but the result will open a free for all with people stealing your images and claiming that a “reasonable search” was conducted. I still see a problem even if the image was used in “good faith.” ANY use of my image without my express permission is a violation of my right to NOT have my image distributed.
The passage of some version of the Orphan Works Bill is inevitable. The question now becomes: How can we protect our images—especially when posting them online? The first task is to make sure that they cannot easily become orphans. Save your information as metadata in your image. You do this by adding file information to the image in post production. Find this setting in the “file” dropdown menu in Photoshop.
Adding metadata is not enough because many of the online “social networks” strip this data when your images are posted. I embed my name and logo into every image that goes online. I wrote a simple action to open my logo file, select the logo, copy the logo, deselect the logo, close the file, paste the logo into my main file, flatten the image, resize it, change the color profile to sRGB, and add file information. While no image is 100% safe online, at least I have taken some basic precautions.