In the case of Wedding Photography there is so much time involved in and the wedding assignment, that I am unaware of any Photographer who is able to charge sufficient fee to cover the creation of negative costs. Therefore, Wedding Photographers rely completely on the sale of reprints or albums to recover their costs.

With the advent of the new Copy Machines several Photographers have found that complete weddings have been copied and they have received basically no income at all for the work put into those weddings.

Some Photographers have found that their Portrait clients have copied their proofs, or where transparency's are used have ordered one print and then had those prints copied at a much lower cost.

Naturally, if this trend continues Photographers will have two choices. One, to put up their fees sufficiently to make a negative creation fee and thereby lose probably a large percentage of their existing customers. Alternatively simply go straight out of business.

THE SOLUTION
I believe that there is a legal solution to offer Photographers protection from this problem.  

I believe that if the Photographers have the copyright assigned to them, or their assignee they will then have legal redress to stop the photocopying of the images they have created.  

PAPERWORK
I believe that the paperwork should be extremely simple. I believe that the wording that the customer will sign assigning the copyright to the Photographer has to be clear, concise and telling them precisely what they are doing and why

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Obviously, the assignment of copyright will have to be such that it will stand up in Court and I believe that within six months off this system being established, it will be tried in Court several times.

THE COMPANY
I believe to make this work the owner of the copyright has got to be prepared to sue in Court anybody and everybody they can prove has infringed their copyright.

I believe that this is beyond the scope of the average Wedding and Portrait Photographer in New Zealand. For this reason I would suggest that a Company be formed, to whom the copyright would be assigned and they would do the policing on behalf of the Photographers to make sure where ever possible the copyright was not being infringed.

The funds to run such an organization would be by a levy on the Photographer, perhaps fifty cents or one dollar for every copyright contract that was assigned to the Company.  

ADVISING PHOTO-COPIERS
The people who do the copying of photographs are either large Laboratories, Mini Labs or Copy Houses. The Photographers Copyright Company obviously would contact all of these people, with examples of how the photographs will be marked to show a copyright is in existence and they will be advised that the Photographers Copyright Company will sue should they make a decision to infringe the copyright on any of the photographs so marked.

This of course would also need to be circulated widely amongst people selling Photocopying Machines and to make sure that as many people as possible knew exactly what the Copyright Law means.

Never the less I would think that ignorance of a law is not sufficient defense if somebody copies a clearly marked photograph.

I would imagine that the writer once we have started moving along the above direction, would be in contact with the Consumers Society to see what they would like incorporated in the above plan and assuming was practical would include their requests.

Several weeks later....PROGRESS
The Copyright Programme is almost already to roll.

The Copyright Attorney and the Barrister have both agreed that what I wish to do is completely achievable and we are now just waiting for the i's to be dotted and the t's to be crossed.

This is the Copyright Programme as I see it:
It will start when you have your initial enquiry. At that stage before you do any Photography you will ask them to sign a Copyright Release, transferring the Copyright from them to your Studio.

There will be a simple explanation provided by the Barrister along with a very simply worded (in English) Copyright Transfer.

If the person refuses to sign this Copyright Transfer, you will then at that stage be able to decide whether you want to proceed with the Photography or not.

The Copyright forms will be sent to Chromatek who will register them with the new Company begin set up to handle this matter.

All of the Copyright forms will need to be registered with the Company within two weeks of the signing of the form, for the Company to be able to protect your interests in the Copyright.

There will be a fee paid with each registration and this will be on a pro-rata basis dependant on the numbers that each Studio will be handling. We will probably rate this on a Lab turnover basis on a starting point.

I have been advised we will need a fighting fund of about $60,000.00 .    This will allow us to fight five simple cases or two difficult ones.   So we are not talking about small change and we can only do this as a united body.

When it is ready I will be holding meetings thro out the country explaining the complete system to those who are interested.

I visualize that the registration fee will be $XX.OO per registration and until there is sufficient working capital built up within the Company to fight what ever Court cases maybe necessary to emphasize that you the Photographer are the owner of the Copyright.

This may mean that for 6-12 months a fee is paid and then after that initial establishment programme the fee will be reduced to a minor figure, merely to keep the thing operational. Naturally, if Court cases are involved this fighting fee will have to be re-established, but I would think if we win a court case we would get costs so extra's would not be involved.

The Barrister says that a trap situation will be completely OK, so in the next few weeks we will be asking for names of people who are illegally copying your Photographs.

We naturally will not be able to do anything about this until we have built up some capital to fight this in court, but if everybody gets behind this it should not take long.

This Copyright protection we will be offering to Chromatek Customers only and will be available to those Customers as long as they continue using the Lab.

This will be given in writing to the varying people that wish to participate.

COURT CASES
The Court case will be fought by the Company against the Copy-house in the name of the Studio.

What this means is that the Studio will in actual fact appear to be suing the Illegal Copier. However, the Company will provide all the finance and Solicitors etc, to do this.

It bombed ....badly...thro lack of support...  however today it would appear as if most photographers could do with this to protect their intellectual property.