We appreciate the non-commercial online use of Bob’s images provided that the image is credited to the artist and links back to his website – moodywatercolors.com, and you notify us of where and how it is used. Check out this Bham Wiki article on Bottega for an appropriate use of a Moody watercolor.
For more information on Creative Commons Licenses, please click HERE.
In the U.S., since 1989, copyright is implicit based on the Berne copyright convention. Whenever you create anything independently and/or privately, you retain ownership of those materials along with the copyright. You are not even required to put a copyright declaration on your site – but to make others aware of the law, you should. An adequate notice is this: “Copyright (year) by (your name or company)”. “All rights reserved” is no longer necessary. Additional information specifically on copyrighting images is found at The Artists Right Society including this:
"A work created (fixed in tangible form for the first time) on or after January 1, 1978, is automatically protected from the moment of its creation and is given a term of copyright protection for the lifetime of the artist plus an additional 70 years after the artist’s death.In the case of “a joint work prepared by two or more artists who did not work for hire,” the term lasts for 70 years after the last surviving artist’s death. For works made for hire, and for anonymous and pseudonymous works (unless the artist’s identity is revealed in Copyright Office records), the duration will be 95 years from first publication or 120 years from creation, whichever is shorter."
You can read the complete copyright act for the U.S. HERE
Information about the protection of original designs is available HERE
Fill out a copyright form and register your ownership HERE
The only exception to ownership by copyright is called “fair use” and information is available HERE.
And GREAT information on the topic, entitled “10 Big Myths about Copyright” by Brad Templeton is located HERE including this quote:
“…today almost all major nations follow the Berne copyright convention. For example, in the USA, almost everything created privately and originally after April 1, 1989 is copyrighted and protected whether it has a notice or not.”
If you’d like to watermark your images, you can find lots of YouTube video tutorials.
Finally, do buyers of your work also buy the rights to reproduction? According to The Artists Rights Society, the answer is an emphatic, “NO”
The claim is sometimes made by proprietors of works of art in the U.S. that ownership of a physical work of art also carries with it ownership of the copyright. This is quite simply a false and misleading assumption.
"…Whenever a work of fine art is sold or otherwise transferred by or on behalf of the artist who created it, or his heirs or personal representatives, the right of reproduction thereof is reserved to the grantor until it passes into the public domain by act or operation of law unless such right is sooner expressly transferred by an instrument, note or memorandum in writing signed by the owner of the rights conveyed or his duly authorized agent" (Section 224, Article 12-E, 1966 New York General Business Law).