Fstoppers: “Most photographers spend years building an archive worth protecting, but very few have a plan for what happens to it after they die. Copyright, physical media, cloud accounts, and stock licensing don’t sort themselves out automatically, and without a plan, decades of work can vanish or get tied up in legal chaos. Coming to you from David Bergman with Adorama, this detailed video has Bergman walking through both the legal and practical sides of protecting your photographic archive after death. Under US copyright law, you own the copyright to your images the moment you press the shutter, and that protection extends for your entire life plus 70 years. That means your archive is a genuine asset, one that could generate income for two generations of your family. The moment you sign that copyright away to a client, that long-term value disappears entirely, not just for you but for whoever inherits your estate. Bergman uses the story of Vivian Maier, the Chicago street photographer whose archive ended up in a storage auction and triggered years of international legal battles, as a sharp example of what happens without a plan…”