Copyright/watermark?

My local meetup is doing an edit challenge. The organizer gave us a raw file to edit to our liking, and then we post it.

One of the members has added a copyright watermark ( © Her Name). Can she do that? The photo is not hers, just the editing of it.

Nope.

Thats what I thought. I'm not going to say anything, although it'll be interesting to see if the meetup organizer says anything, if nothing else as a learning experience.

The copyright owner has the right to allow others to copy, edit, distribute etc., but the copyright still remains with them. re-cropping and minor edits wont change that.

However, if the editing was so extreme that it could be considered transformative then it might be different. If you took 8 photos and chopped them up and made a collage, that could be considered an original creative work and subject to copyright protection. That still wouldn't alter the fact that the photographer owned the copyright on the original photo.

Could also be a simple issue of automated scripts in their pipeline. One of my classmates in university got in real trouble over a few assignments he submitted. His computer had died, and he hated working in the school labs, so he dropped by my place and used my setup. My IDE had been configured for a bunch of auto fill and structure generation. Fill in a few fields when you create the project, and it automatically stamped each file with a few things. One of them, a copyright notice... with my name.

Needless to say he did not notice till the prof called him into his office about the issue.

Didn't help that it was a class I had taken the term before, and one of the assignments used a different variant on the process that I had used. Having spent a lot of time talking about the topic I had given him enough to come up with his own implementation (Which worked better than mine and fixed an edge case error I had originally missed.)

Made for a somewhat awkward conversation till I remembered I had done all my work for that class in another language.