6. Photographer's Survival Manual: A Legal Guide for Artists in the Digital Age by Edward C. GreenbergMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
If you want to learn how to register your images with the Copyright office, this book has a very good step-by-step walk through. It also explains the legal reasons you should register your images and what your rights are. Also included are chapters on releases, and contracts and invoices with examples.
The authors (including a trial lawyer who's argued many copyright infringement cases) are good at making legalese understandable and pointing out which phrases are key to include or avoid.
I do wish they had included more details about registering published images. If everything you've put on the web is published (arguable but the stance they take), then it'd be helpful to walk through that registration process in more depth. (Their walk through focuses more on the much simpler process for unpublished images.)
The book includes sample release forms which you can use, but it would have been great if they'd put them on the web somewhere along with some of their other contract examples. It's all well and good to tell the reader to leave a half page of legal text just the way it is, but it's not so simple to type it out exactly.
Still, it's a very good and informative read on legal issues that affect the businesses and livelihoods of photographers (and other visual artists). Just wish it were longer.
A year ago on TTaT: Bleck
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