Not only from a copyrighted perspective, but also because of the importance of digital images nowadays, this question is key. In our world where people no longer read text, it goes without saying that “an image is worth a thousand words”.

1. Copyright criteria

Copyright is a legal monopoly that protects published or unpublished original work from unauthorized duplication during a limited period. According to a principle established by the Berne Convention, copyright is automatic and requires no fees and no formalities to satisfy. Copyright owners are therefore allowed to exploit ideas provided that they are original and once they have been expressed and recorded in a work.

2. What are digital images?

Most digital works – digital images, digital sound recordings or films, digital broadcasts, electronic books etc. – easily comply with the criteria for copyright protection. Nonetheless, the situation of digital works still remains somewhat unclear, since there is no definition in copyright legislation of ‘multimedia’ or ‘digital media’ as such.

It is commonly acknowledged that digital images consist in two processes: digital images can be created from the digitization of analogue images (for example, when an image is scanned into an image file). But digital images can also result from the creation of new purely digital products (for example, when a digital image is created though software). The notion of digital image includes digital photographs taken on mobile phones and digital cameras.

Digital images are generally in .jpeg or .tiff formats; a .jpeg image is compressed in order to reduce the image size and to facilitate the loading and storage. In contrary, there is no compression with .tiff images in order to keep the integrity of the image if needed, for example, in litigation.

3. In practice

Therefore, even when a work can only exist in analogue form, such as a painting of Picasso, a digital photograph of it would be a digital copy of the painting and the photograph would therefore be a copyrighted work in its own right.

Clearly, there is no additional condition for digital images. Therefore, to the extent that they are original, digital image fall within the conditions to benefit from copyright protection. In reality, it goes without saying that most images, whether analogue or digital, are protected by copyright.

4. Read more

For a correlated subject matter, read the article “Do copyrights survive in photographs”.