Your work will be stolen and the courts are not the answer

What you already have

In most countries — those in the Berne Convention, which is nearly all of them — copyright exists the moment the work is fixed. You do not need a symbol, a notice, or a registration for the right to exist. That part is automatic and free.

Registration does three narrower things. It creates evidence of a date. In some systems it is a precondition to acting: in the United States you generally must register before you can file an infringement suit, and registering promptly is what unlocks statutory damages and legal fees, which is the only thing that makes a small claim economically worth bringing. India maintains an optional register whose entries serve as prima facie evidence. Elsewhere it varies.

What registration does not do, anywhere: stop anyone.

The free evidence habit

Keep the layered file, the raw footage, the sketches, the dated emails, the version history. A PSD with forty named layers and a creation date is stronger evidence of authorship than a certificate with no working files behind it, and it costs nothing but a folder structure.

Back it up somewhere that is not your laptop. A drive that dies takes your proof with it.

Watermarks, and where they stop working

Say the mechanism honestly. A watermark in the corner is removed by a crop. A semi-transparent one across the middle of the image is removed by content-aware fill or a generative eraser in about fifteen seconds, and that got dramatically easier in the last three years. It is not coming back.

What still works, because it relies on resolution and sequence rather than on pixels being hard to edit:

• Send proofs at display resolution only. A 900-pixel JPEG cannot be printed, whatever anyone does to it.
• Release source files after payment, never before.
• For video, burn a moving timecode and a name across the centre of review cuts. Cropping it out destroys the frame.
• For photography, deliver client galleries with download disabled. Weak against anyone determined, effective against the casual copying that accounts for most of it.

The goal is not to make theft impossible. It is to make the stolen copy useless for the use that would have paid you.

When it happens anyway

The order of effectiveness is not the order most people try.

1. 1Screenshot it, with the URL and date visible. Do this first, before anything else, because it disappears the moment you make contact.
2. 2Send a short, unemotional message. A surprising proportion of infringement is a junior employee who found the image on Pinterest and assumed it was free. A polite note, plus an invoice for a licence, resolves more cases than anything further down this list.
3. 3File a platform takedown. Every major platform has a copyright complaint form, and hosts and content delivery networks respond to notices. This is the fastest lever available to you and it costs nothing.
4. 4Contact their client or their advertiser. A business running stolen work in a campaign cares far more about the campaign being pulled than about your feelings, and moves within hours rather than months.
5. 5A lawyer's letter, if the sums justify the fee.
6. 6Court. Almost never worth it across a border for a single image. Saying otherwise would be dishonest.

Notice that the two cheapest steps are also the two most effective, and that both of them are things you can do from a phone in ten minutes.

The part nobody says out loud

Being copied is partly a signal about the work. Nobody steals the invisible.

The rational response is a set of small habits — keep evidence, send low-resolution proofs, hold source files until paid, screenshot before you contact anyone — not a defensive crouch where you stop publishing. A portfolio nobody can see costs you far more than a stolen image ever will, and the freelancers who publish least are not the ones being copied least. They are the ones not being hired.