Are there any sites where you can copyright your photographs for free?

Answer 1

Copyright in and to an original artistic or intellectual work in Canada and the United States (and many other countries) is automatic and without cost...if you wrote it, painted it, performed it, composed it or otherwise devised it, and it is original, you own it - you are automatically the copyright owner with no other formalities required...with one caveat !! If you publish the work in any form - that is, if you make the work available to the public in any manner whatsoever, you must publish with it a notice of copyright that includes the name of the copyright owner, to inform any potential infringer that the material is not public domain.

Proving ownership, in the case of a dispute, however, is another question entirely.

You can use the age-old method of mailing notarized sealed copies of your works to yourself (and leaving them sealed), and this will usually stand as prima facie evidence of the earliest creation of the work, provided there is a date stamp attached at the post office. The notary can be anyone believable who will stand up in court and attest to their signature and the date thereof.

The United States and Canada and many other countries have reciprocal agreements to protect the rights of the creators of original works, but a few have no agreement, or agreements that are not enforced.

In any case, do not pay anyone to copyright your works.You are already the copyright owner if the works are original. You can pay a fee to register copyright with the copyright office of your country of residence, but this only registers the title of a work and not the work itself, so it is more or less a formality to say that you registered something on such and such a date that was called something or other.

Your best proof of ownership is personal, believable contacts who can attest to the originality of the work and to the date of its first occurence.

In addition to all this, keep in mind that nobody really gives a hoot about your material until it is famous, by which time it will usually be well established who created it anyway.