Photo Mad 

Reporter:  Ruwani Perera

Any photo you take is protected - by copyright law.  But unlike an author whose name is clearly on the cover of a book they wrote - or the artist who created a painting - the photos we take might show our faces but they rarely show our names, making it hard to prove a particular image is yours.

Fair Go came across a great example of this where a NZ woman was convinced she had taken a fantastic photo of a rainbow 2 years ago on a road trip to Raglan on Waikato's West Coast. The photo then appeared on various websites around the world.

It eventually became clear that the image was taken by an American photographer. He was able to prove to Fair Go that he had taken the photograph and the rainbow was in Missouri, not the Waikato.

Our advice: if you can, Photoshop a watermark onto photos you want printed; set up your camera to print time and date; and if youre posting online, make sure theyre as low-resolution as possible this deters people from making copies.

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