Under proposed new legislation contained in the recent Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act which received Royal Ascent last week, you may end up not retaining the copyright of all the photographs that you take.
Here’s some more detailed information about this from the BBC, Mashable and The Register. As usual, the changes to the UK Copyright Law are buried in the main act and only now are seeing the light of day.
What to do? I’ve written to my MP about the changes, you can do the same using the Write to Them website to make your feelings known.
It seems the UK government is more interested in protecting the copyright of large media corporations (mostly USA based) than UK individuals copyright.
This is not right and need to be changed.
Copy of Letter to my MP.
I am sure that you will have seen some of the press coverage about this yesterday and today, such as from the BBC, Mashable and The Register. I cannot understand why the UK government seems so intent dismissing the copyright of creators of photographs. Yesterday I took a picture of a plant in my back garden. That image is mine and will always be so.
However, now that I have loaded this into social media and some of the Metadata has been stripped off – by them, it may be considered an ‘orphan’ work by some and according to my understanding of the potential legislation, available for reuse and profiteering by others without a single royalty payment being made to me. Surely this cannot be right?
Why does the UK government want to take away my copyright, yet seems so eager to legislate for big media (usually USA based) organisations to keep their copyright. These changes to copyright law will put the UK out of step with may other countries and I cannot understand the logic in the changes.
I would appreciate your comments and feedback on this and if you agree with the intention to strip my rights to copyright away.
I’ll also post any reply I get.
Beasley's Place 