The Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill (from the UK) contains new controversial and wide-ranging copyright propositions that will affect photographers all over the world.
The bill was originally written to eradicate unnecessary bureaucracy and the controversial amendments propose to allow the use of orphan works, such as images that lack metadata and whose copyright owners cannot be found, freely.
While that’s good on paper, the fact that social sites routinely strip the metadata from uploaded images may pose a threat to your images. Once your images, stripped of metadata, are incorporated into the work of others, such as websites, newspapers, periodicals, books, films, music recordings and broadcasts, they can be very difficult to trace back to their original owners — and thus become technically orphaned.
Unless social sites retain the metadata in your uploaded photos to permanently identify the photos as yours, you may soon be seeing your photos used freely all over the world.
Read the article at: BJP.