| Keeping Real Estate Listing Images Copyright Protected |
I'll start this post by stating that I am NOT a professional photographer. But I do go through great pains to get the best images I can for my real estate listings and sellers.
That being said; if your Multiple Listing Service (MLS) is like ours, once an image is uploaded to a listing, you lose your copyright protection of those images (Just think about how many sites pickup our listings to help us sell them). And if you're anything like me, you may spend a LOT of time in Photoshop (or another photo editor), tweaking your real estate listing pictures to perfection. So of course it burns me up when after some time, one of my old listings goes back on the market with a different agent (someone the buyers know) who is NOT proficient at taking pictures OR at editing them, and uses my previous images. (The ultimate 
in laziness?)
This can be even more frustrating if you've hired a professional photographer (who initially owns the copyright to the images), and had to pay for the rights to use the images in a commercial manner, only to have a less proficient agent use them at a later date.
So recently, I tried something new (new for me anyway). I watermarked the images on one of my listings. But now the problem is, the watermark takes away from what I was trying to accomplish in the first place... a beautiful image that attracts a buyer! But how else do you stop lazy, incompetent agents from looking like they can do a better job of marketing a listing than they actually can?
This post contains some examples of the watermarks I placed on a recent listing. (I've also started removing my images from my listings before they close, or before they're withdrawn or expired. But with all the web sites who pickup our listings and images, they're still out there on the web. The very thing that helps in our marketing, is what also helps bad agents look better than they really are.)
As real estate professionals, what is your opinion? It's not like we can put our names on the images in the MLS. That would violate the rules. And we can't mention it in the public comments section of a listing; that would be unprofessional IMHO. I suppose we could mention it in the "Agent Remarks" section that's in our MLS, but I really doubt it would matter, since these are the very REALTORS® don't read that section, or wouldn't care anyway, and the listing and images have already gone viral as well.
So, what are your thoughts? Opinions? Comments? Any other ideas? I'm extremely frustrated when I know darned well that the other agents would not have decent pictures of my previous listings if they didn't have access to mine! BTW, this is coming to a head for me now, because I recently ran across a house I sold about 5 years ago, containing the images I took, and painstakingly edited at that time. (Grrrr!)
(FYI, "LCH-7505" is my way of marking my images without violating our MLS rules.)
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