Has anyone else had this happen to them? I had a D-List celebrity steal one and had a lawyer make them pay up but the US government is a bit of a different beast. I’ve had Cuba and Russia steal it too. I’m not sure it’s worth kicking that hornet nest.
I should probably copyright register it.
I don’t know about the other countries (esp. Russia who has very lax copyright laws), but the US govt probably does it by accident often enough that if you send them a bill for the licensing, they’ll probably just pay it to avoid the hassle.
I can’t find anything on that and it would appear from what I have found the photos they use are either government produced and not copyrighted or have been assigned to the government and no longer protected.
So that’s a concern too.
Copyright is automatic on creation of the work. There’s nothing to register.
Good habit is to watermark your work.
As someone that does media for various branches, it’s happens painfully often.
When I was with a library system, the head of the comms team downloaded a persons cooking video from youtube, edited out every instance of the channels logo on the bottom and clips of the persons face then uploaded it like “To celebrate this event, here’s our recipe for this dish”. They didn’t see anything wrong with what they did. For Behavioral Health, they sent me a watermarked photo they liked and asked if I could just remove the watermark and use it for fliers.
Only person that ever double checked if we had a license for an image was up in admin. Everyone else had this surreal idea that if something was online, it was free to use.