have had an account for a while, but only really uploaded much onto it yesterday. there are various licence account settings. as a highly amateur photographer who just wants to make sure nobody nicks my pics without at least asking, which setting is the one to go for?

not expecting to make money or anything like that, just stop people taking the piss.

any suggestions gratefully received!

all rights reserved…oh and watermarks might become a good idea if the digital economy bill gets passed then it cant be claimed it was an orphan:

The Parliaments page on the DEB progress through the house.
services.parliament.uk/bills/2009-10/digitaleconomy.html

Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Economy_Bill

Copyright Action's page
copyrightaction.com/forum/uk-gov-nationalises-orphans-and…

Copyright Action's MP letter template –
copyrightaction.com/digital-economy-bill-mp-letter-template

Govt want to push this through before May 6th – and have seemingly ignored objections to it – Mandelson is of course behind most of ti, but the less said about him the better.

Also some interesting amendments being proposed to data protection, which would seem on first read to make it almost illegal to take photos in public without peoples who may appear in the image consent (thus killing of street photography with one fell swoop) – of course this doesnt apply to CCTV,s o its all a bit kafkaesque

This is an interesting thread. Something (as an ameteur snapper) I'm getting more and moe interseted in right now.
Tell me more about the 'digital economy bill'…………

This guy:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ralphstewart/

Is a friend, he's keen amateur with plenty of time to spend on flickr. he uses 'all rights reserved' and has still had a fair bit of interest in using his shots – he's got the cover of a bagpipes cd – you know the type that you get in the rack at a garden centre etc! anyway the point being that having the most protected copyright hasn't put people off asking to use the photos, so i would go for that. But bear in mind that it won't prevent theft, and even if you could later prove an image is yours it might be prohibitively expensive to make a legal case.

Basically Flickr and other sites have thousands of shit hot images, lost in the millions of crappy ones. If you are worried about copyright theft, then you should use istockphoto or something like that.

I've had a couple of my images used on online travel guides, all were marked as all rights reserved but the people emailed to ask if they could use it. If you fancy selling images or think people may wish to use them, try putting them on a site like http://www.photo4me.com and see if you get any bites. I've not yet.

i'm being yet dimmer now – having asked the question i can't find the bit on flickr where you change it!