About
OP©P is a non profit, voluntary organisation with the aim of getting UK photographers to join and reduce (nothing will never stop it) copyright abuse, it is particularly important to stop abuse when you are starting off your career so OP©P is mainly aimed at new photographers, although the information contained on the site may be useful to any photographer, amateur or professional, new or old.
The photographic industry is in a mess in the UK and has been for a long time, there’s no coherence at all, it is broken up into individual photographers and organisations that may want to or believe they are strengthening the industry but are in fact, the reason it is in the current position it is in.
There are currently no organisations in the UK at grass roots level that actively follows or reports © abuse for individual photographers or tries to unite photographers to achieve the same result, (At the time of writing there was not but, it’s not the same situation since the launch of OP©P, Copyright Action and Pro-Imaging) unless you’re a fully paid up member; And even then it doesn’t always turn out the way it should, we think that’s outrageous especially as all the emphasis recently has all been on music files but your photographs are exactly the same; they deserve the same respect and pursuit of illegal use.
Will it work?
Only time will tell.
WHY ?
If you’re a photographer there’s nothing worse than seeing an image being used without your permission, whilst it is good to see your images out there, after all that’s what it’s about isn’t it, peoples lack of respect makes your heart sink.
There is NO excuse, intentionally using images without paying for them is a personal insult and the worst sign of professionalism that you can show to a photographer, if an individual or company uses an image and don’t know who it belongs to then they shouldn’t be using it until they do or find an alternative, we know most photographs creators are easily traceable, especially ones that have had watermarks and metadata removed by those users.
Part of the problem is that there’s no central resource or database where you can report these incidents so we can’t get a true indication of the amount of © abuse that actually goes on in this country, people are lazy, can’t be bothered or too busy to be crawling the www or magazines etc… for unlicensed images and that’s why they get away with it.
