After many months of preparation I?ve just finished the application for the registration of over 42.000 photos with the Copyright Office of the Library of Congress in the USA.
That's why actually our website has been stuck for quite a while, coupled with some health problems I?ve been facing for some time.
Login screen of Copyright procedure
You might wonder why I did that? Because we share our content for free on Nomad Travellers, to be used for non commercial and private purposes, but when somebody is making money out of it, then it's not nice any more. And this happens more often than you might think: we have found hundreds of cases of our photos infringed and used commercially without authorization.
If somebody would sell high class luxury travel tours costing 5.000$ showcasing your photos, wouldn't you get a little bit pissed off? Wouldn't you get even more pissed off after investigating a little bit and finding out that the owners of this company are 3 millionaires? That's just one of the many real cases that happened to us.
Registering the photos online with the experimental 'Eco' system, gives you more protection in case your photos are infringed by an American citizen and in case you decide to sue him (and almost certainly win the trial), then you could obtain an extra reimbursement of the Statutory damages from a minimum of 750$ to 30.000$ per each photo infringed. And if they willingly removed your watermark it can go up to 150.000$ for one single photo!
We are not planning to sue anybody at the moment, that's not the kind of energy we like, but it's good to have a deterrent to increase the chances of seeing your hard work valued.
The whole process is really bureaucratic and it wasn't enjoyable at all. I wasted weeks of my life just to read the regulations, tutorials and guides, since I couldn't afford the opinion of a legal consultant.
We believe in a totally different society and free sharing of resources and creativity. But unfortunately there is no basic income for artists and people are not sharing their food for free with us, so until then, we have to comply with the existing situation and at least try to protect our photos from unwanted usages.
Davide Vadalà
