Digital image rights?

Philip Dunn highlights a potential threat to commercial photography in the UK, but is he seeing the whole picture?

Dunn, a former Sunday Times photographer, claims on onlinejournalismblog.com (OJB) that part of the Digital Economy Bill will overturn current UK copyright law on your rights to own an image.

Dunn explains:

The idea that the author of a photograph has total rights over his or her own work – as laid out in International Law and The Copyright Act of 1988 – will be utterly ignored. In future, if you wish to retain any control over your work, you will have to register that work (and each version of it) with a new agency yet to be set up.

It seems there’s some slight disagreement among photographers on Dunn’s interpretation of the Bill, however, with a lively debate in the blog comments.

Dunn is backed up in his claim by a copyright statement by The Royal Photographic Society (this opens as a PDF)

Read the full text on OJB and decide for yourself

This move apparently follows a similar law in the USA, so Fired By Design readers there may have some insight into how this will affect commercial photography.
Read the bill

What do you think?

A comment on the original post directs users to this useful webpage, which deals with some of the more recurrent points that are made about this legislation