FAQ: Do my photos stay mine when I upload them?
Yes!
As we set out in our Terms of use, everything you upload to iSpot remains yours. All you're doing by putting your photos up is saying it's OK to use them on the site. In legal terms, you are granting us a non-exclusive licence to the material.
We really appreciate having good nature photos on the site, and we know that many good photographers quite reasonably want to protect their rights in their photographs.
If you are concerned about people infringing your rights in your photos, it makes sense to mark them with a copyright statement. Many photo formats allow you to add this information within the file, or you might want to use a watermarking tool or text overlay tool to add a copyright statement to the image itself.
(We hope to make this easier in future by adding an 'add watermark' option when you upload photos to iSpot.)
Infringing other people's rights is against the iSpot Terms of use. If you find that an iSpot user has done this, please let us know - either by Flagging as inappropriate the post that concerns you, or via the Contact form if it's not something on the site. We can't pass on any personal information about users on the site unless required to by law, but we will take action against people who breach our terms of use.