AI Watermark Remover vs. a Copyright Notice: What the Statutes Actually Say, Quoted

Three different things get called a watermark

People use one word for three objects that behave differently in law. The three-way split below is our reading of the quoted texts, not statutory language - the statutes never use the word “watermark”. What follows is the framing we use to decide which quoted provision applies:

• A notice of copyright - the © / year / owner string described in 17 U.S.C. §401(b). It exists to tell the world who owns the work.
• An attribution or credit mark - a studio name, a handle, a URL, a photographer credit. It may have no © and no year at all. It can still be “copyright management information” under §1202(c).
• An anti-theft preview overlay - the repeating tiled mark a stock library puts over an unlicensed preview. What governs it is not the CMI provisions but the licence you accepted (or did not accept) for that preview file.

The practical consequence: the first two are about who made it, the third is about whether you paid. Removing the first two raises an attribution question. Removing the third before you hold a licence raises a licence question. We keep separate pages for the three big stock libraries' own comp-licence wording; this page is about the notice and the credit.

What a notice of copyright is: 17 U.S.C. §401, quoted

Quoted from the U.S. Copyright Office's online edition of Title 17 (Circular 92), Chapter 4. §401(a) General Provisions:

“Whenever a work protected under this title is published in the United States or elsewhere by authority of the copyright owner, a notice of copyright as provided by this section may be placed on publicly distributed copies from which the work can be visually perceived, either directly or with the aid of a machine or device.”

§401(b) Form of Notice:

“If a notice appears on the copies, it shall consist of the following three elements: (1) the symbol © (the letter C in a circle), or the word “Copyright”, or the abbreviation “Copr.”; and (2) the year of first publication of the work; in the case of compilations or derivative works incorporating previously published material, the year date of first publication of the compilation or derivative work is sufficient. The year date may be omitted where a pictorial, graphic, or sculptural work, with accompanying text matter, if any, is reproduced in or on greeting cards, postcards, stationery, jewelry, dolls, toys, or any useful articles; and (3) the name of the owner of copyright in the work, or an abbreviation by which the name can be recognized, or a generally known alternative designation of the owner.”

§401(c) Position of Notice:

“The notice shall be affixed to the copies in such manner and location as to give reasonable notice of the claim of copyright.”

Two things follow directly from the text. First, the three elements are conjunctive: a mark missing the year, or missing the owner name, is not a notice “as provided by this section”. Most of the marks people actually encounter - a logo, a handle, a domain name - have neither a year nor necessarily an owner name in the statutory sense. Second, §401(a) says a notice “may be placed”, not “must be placed”.

§401(d) Evidentiary Weight of Notice is the part that matters when a notice is present:

“If a notice of copyright in the form and position specified by this section appears on the published copy or copies to which a defendant in a copyright infringement suit had access, then no weight shall be given to such a defendant’s interposition of a defense based on innocent infringement in mitigation of actual or statutory damages, except as provided in the last sentence of section 504(c)(2).”

Read plainly: the notice is what takes the “I didn't know it was copyrighted” argument off the table. That is the job the notice does, and it is the reason removing one is a different act from simply failing to add one.

Removing the notice does not remove the copyright: §405(c), quoted

This is the single most misread provision in the whole area. §405(c) Removal of Notice reads, in full:

“Protection under this title is not affected by the removal, destruction, or obliteration of the notice, without the authorization of the copyright owner, from any publicly distributed copies or phonorecords.”

So the copyright survives intact. What the sentence does not say is that the removal was permitted - it says only that the removal does not cancel the owner's rights. Those are different questions, and the second one is answered elsewhere (§1202, below).

For completeness, §405(a) Effect of Omission on Copyright opens:

“With respect to copies and phonorecords publicly distributed by authority of the copyright owner before the effective date of the Berne Convention Implementation Act of 1988, the omission of the copyright notice described in sections 401 through 403 from copies or phonorecords publicly distributed by authority of the copyright owner does not invalidate the copyright in a work if — (1) the notice has been omitted from no more than a relatively small number of copies or phonorecords distributed to the public; or (2) registration for the work has been made before or is made within five years after the publication without notice, and a reasonable effort is made to add notice to all copies or phonorecords that are distributed to the public in the United States after the omission has been discovered; or (3) the notice has been omitted in violation of an express requirement in writing that, as a condition of the copyright owner’s authorization of the public distribution of copies or phonorecords, they bear the prescribed notice.”

Inference, clearly marked as ours: §405(a) limits itself to copies distributed “before the effective date of the Berne Convention Implementation Act of 1988”, which is why the omission rules read as historical curative provisions rather than as a current requirement to print a notice. That is our reading of the quoted wording; the statute does not spell out a conclusion for later copies in the text quoted here, and we are not going to assert one beyond what is printed above.

The wider net: DMCA §1202 catches more than the © symbol

Whether a mark is a §401 notice turns out not to be the decisive question, because §1202 defines its own subject matter separately and more broadly. Quoted from Chapter 12 of the same official edition, §1202(b) Removal or Alteration of Copyright Management Information:

“No person shall, without the authority of the copyright owner or the law — (1) intentionally remove or alter any copyright management information, (2) distribute or import for distribution copyright management information knowing that the copyright management information has been removed or altered without authority of the copyright owner or the law, or (3) distribute, import for distribution, or publicly perform works, copies of works, or phonorecords, knowing that copyright management information has been removed or altered without authority of the copyright owner or the law, knowing, or, with respect to civil remedies under section 1203, having reasonable grounds to know, that it will induce, enable, facilitate, or conceal an infringement of any right under this title.”

§1202(c) Definition - the part that decides whether your mark is covered:

“As used in this section, the term “copyright management information” means any of the following information conveyed in connection with copies or phonorecords of a work or performances or displays of a work, including in digital form, except that such term does not include any personally identifying information about a user of a work or of a copy, phonorecord, performance, or display of a work:

(1) The title and other information identifying the work, including the information set forth on a notice of copyright.

(2) The name of, and other identifying information about, the author of a work.

(3) The name of, and other identifying information about, the copyright owner of the work, including the information set forth in a notice of copyright.”

The definition also reaches “(6) Terms and conditions for use of the work” and “(7) Identifying numbers or symbols referring to such information or links to such information.”

The consequences of that wording, stated as plainly as the text allows: a credit does not need a ©, a year, or any particular placement to be CMI. A photographer's name in the corner, a studio wordmark, or a caption naming the author is “the name of, and other identifying information about, the author of a work”. §1202(c)(1) and (c)(3) say explicitly that CMI includes the information set forth on a notice of copyright - they do not say CMI is limited to it. One carve-out is written into the definition itself: “personally identifying information about a user of a work” is excluded.

What the statute requires beyond the act of removing

The removal alone is not the whole test. Read §1202(b) again: the opening words are “without the authority of the copyright owner or the law”, and every one of the three limbs ends in the same tail - the person must act “knowing, or, with respect to civil remedies under section 1203, having reasonable grounds to know, that it will induce, enable, facilitate, or conceal an infringement of any right under this title.”

Two conditions therefore sit on top of the physical act:

• Authority. Permission from the copyright owner, or permission from “the law”, makes the act fall outside §1202(b) on its own terms. This is the hook for licences - and, as the next-but-one section shows, some licences require the credit to be taken off.
• The infringement nexus. The knowledge element is not knowledge “that this is someone's copyright” - the text says knowledge that the removal “will induce, enable, facilitate, or conceal an infringement of any right under this title”.

What is at stake if it does apply is stated in §1203(c)(3)(B) Statutory damages:

“At any time before final judgment is entered, a complaining party may elect to recover an award of statutory damages for each violation of section 1202 in the sum of not less than $2,500 or more than $25,000.”

That figure is quoted, not estimated: it is the number printed in §1203(c)(3)(B), and it is per violation of section 1202. §1203(c)(4) adds that where a person has violated §1201 or §1202 within three years after a final judgment was entered against that person for another such violation, “the court may increase the award of damages up to triple the amount that would otherwise be awarded.”

The EU version: Directive 2001/29/EC, Article 7, quoted

Quoted from Directive 2001/29/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council on the harmonisation of certain aspects of copyright and related rights in the information society. Article 7 Obligations concerning rights-management information, paragraph 1:

“Member States shall provide for adequate legal protection against any person knowingly performing without authority any of the following acts: (a) the removal or alteration of any electronic rights-management information; (b) the distribution, importation for distribution, broadcasting, communication or making available to the public of works or other subject-matter protected under this Directive or under Chapter III of Directive 96/9/EC from which electronic rights-management information has been removed or altered without authority, if such person knows, or has reasonable grounds to know, that by so doing he is inducing, enabling, facilitating or concealing an infringement of any copyright or any rights related to copyright as provided by law, or of the sui generis right provided for in Chapter III of Directive 96/9/EC.”

Article 7(2) definition:

“For the purposes of this Directive, the expression “rights-management information” means any information provided by rightholders which identifies the work or other subject-matter referred to in this Directive or covered by the sui generis right provided for in Chapter III of Directive 96/9/EC, the author or any other rightholder, or information about the terms and conditions of use of the work or other subject-matter, and any numbers or codes that represent such information. The first subparagraph shall apply when any of these items of information is associated with a copy of, or appears in connection with the communication to the public of, a work or other subject-matter referred to in this Directive or covered by the sui generis right provided for in Chapter III of Directive 96/9/EC.”

Three differences from the US text are visible on the face of the words:

• It is addressed to Member States (“Member States shall provide for adequate legal protection”), so the operative rules are national implementations, not this Article directly.
• It is limited to “electronic” rights-management information.
• Its knowledge element (“knowingly performing without authority”, “knows, or has reasonable grounds to know, that by so doing he is inducing, enabling, facilitating or concealing an infringement”) tracks the same shape as §1202(b), but here it is attached to the person performing the act in 7(1) opening words as well as to the downstream distribution in 7(1)(b).

The case where the licence orders you to delete the credit: CC BY 4.0 §3(a)(3)

This is the counter-example that makes the whole subject worth reading slowly. Quoted from the legal code of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License. Section 3(a)(1):

“If You Share the Licensed Material (including in modified form), You must: a. retain the following if it is supplied by the Licensor with the Licensed Material: i. identification of the creator(s) of the Licensed Material and any others designated to receive attribution, in any reasonable manner requested by the Licensor (including by pseudonym if designated); ii. a copyright notice; iii. a notice that refers to this Public License; iv. a notice that refers to the disclaimer of warranties; v. a URI or hyperlink to the Licensed Material to the extent reasonably practicable;”

So the licence's default is retention - a copyright notice is item (ii) on the retain list. And then Section 3(a)(3) says:

“If requested by the Licensor, You must remove any of the information required by Section 3(a)(1)(A) to the extent reasonably practicable.”

There is therefore at least one mainstream licence under which removing a credit is not merely allowed but required, once the licensor asks. Attribution is not a one-way ratchet. The same licence also keeps a category of rights outside the grant entirely - Section 2(b)(1):

“Moral rights, such as the right of integrity, are not licensed under this Public License, nor are publicity, privacy, and/or other similar personality rights; however, to the extent possible, the Licensor waives and/or agrees not to assert any such rights held by the Licensor to the limited extent necessary to allow You to exercise the Licensed Rights, but not otherwise.”

Inference, clearly marked as ours: because moral rights sit outside the CC grant and are only waived to the limited extent described, an attribution obligation can rest on more than the licence text - it can also rest on a moral right of the kind that the quoted provision declines to license. We are drawing that from the two quoted CC provisions; the licence does not itself define what moral rights any given country grants.

Attribution credits versus anti-theft preview overlays

The distinction that most searches miss. Inference, clearly marked as ours, drawn from the texts quoted above:

• A credit answers “who made this”. Its removal is governed by the CMI provisions (§1202 in the US, Article 7 in the EU) and by whatever licence covers the file - including the CC BY 4.0 case where removal is mandated on request.
• A preview overlay answers “has this been paid for”. Nothing in §1202 or in Article 7 is about payment; the obligation there comes from the licence terms for that preview file. We quote the Adobe, Getty and Shutterstock comp-licence wording on their own pages; none of that is repeated here because those provisions are licence terms, not CMI provisions, and mixing the two is exactly the mistake that produces bad advice.
• A mark can be both: a tiled library overlay usually also carries the library's name, which is “identifying information about ... the copyright owner” under §1202(c)(3). Holding a licence for the image removes the payment problem; it does not by itself answer the CMI question, which turns on authority and on the knowledge element in §1202(b).

What the tool actually does with a notice, checked in the code

None of the above tells you what a piece of software does, so here is what this one does, stated only as verified code facts:

• It does not detect watermarks. There is no automatic watermark detection. You paint the region; the software edits only the pixels you painted. Nobody - not us, not a model - decides what counts as a notice.
• The fill is propagation, not generation. The inpaint routine is Telea's Fast-Marching Method (comment at app.js line 110). The comment that follows it states: “Fills the masked region by propagating known pixels inward, in order of distance from the boundary, weighting each source by how well its gradient points toward the target pixel. This actually reconstructs a plausible background even for a fully-painted solid watermark.”
• It runs on your device. app.js contains no fetch, no XMLHttpRequest, no WebSocket and no sendBeacon call, and no .js or .html file on the site contains any external URL.
• Formats. Input: PNG, JPG, JPEG, WebP, BMP, GIF. Output: PNG or JPEG. It does not do batch processing, it does not process video.

One consequence deserves to be said out loud, because it is the opposite of what “remove” suggests in ordinary English. Inference, clearly marked as ours, from the quoted code comment: because the region is filled by propagating known pixels inward from the boundary, the output is a reconstruction of what the surrounding pixels imply - it is not a recovery of whatever the mark was painted over. If a credit was burned into the image file, what sat underneath it is gone, and the fill is a plausible replacement. For a photo you are about to publish, that is usually the whole point. For an image you may need to rely on as evidence - a screenshot in a dispute, an insurance photograph, anything where the provenance of a pixel matters - it means the edited file should not be treated as showing what was originally there. Keep the original.

A checklist before you take a credit off

Drawn only from the provisions quoted on this page. It is a reading aid, not advice about your situation.

• Identify which of the three objects it is - §401 notice, CMI-style credit, or preview overlay. The three-element test in §401(b) is the quickest way to tell the first from the second.
• Find the authority. §1202(b) opens with “without the authority of the copyright owner or the law”, and Article 7(1) says “knowingly performing without authority”. A licence, a written permission, or a term of service that authorises the edit is the document to look for - not a general impression.
• Check whether the licence points the other way. CC BY 4.0 §3(a)(1)(A)(ii) puts “a copyright notice” on the retain list by default, and §3(a)(3) flips it to removal on the licensor's request. Both directions exist.
• Remember that removing a notice changes nothing about ownership. §405(c): “Protection under this title is not affected by the removal, destruction, or obliteration of the notice.” Stripping a notice off someone else's image does not make it yours.
• Keep the unedited original. The fill is a reconstruction from neighbouring pixels, so the original is the only copy that shows what was actually there.

Where every quote on this page came from

Provenance, so you can check any line yourself:

• 17 U.S.C. §401 and §405 - U.S. Copyright Office, online edition of Title 17 (Circular 92), Chapter 4, “Copyright Notice, Deposit, and Registration”. Fetched from copyright.gov and reproduced word for word, including the numbered elements of §401(b) and the full text of §405(c).
• 17 U.S.C. §1202 and §1203(c)(3)(B) - same official edition, Chapter 12, “Copyright Protection and Management Systems”. Footnote markers in the original are omitted; no other words were changed.
• Directive 2001/29/EC, Article 7 - the English-language text of the Directive as published by EUR-Lex (CELEX 32001L0029), Article 7 paragraphs 1 and 2.
• CC BY 4.0 §2(b)(1), §3(a)(1)(A), §3(a)(3) - the plain-text legal code of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License as published by Creative Commons.
• Everything about the software - read directly out of this site's own source: the inpaint comment at app.js line 110, the absence of fetch / XMLHttpRequest / WebSocket / sendBeacon, and the absence of external URLs across the site's .js and .html files.

Every passage in italics and quotation marks on this page is copied from one of those documents. Everything we concluded rather than copied is labelled as an inference at the point it appears. This page quotes law; it is not legal advice, and it says nothing about jurisdictions whose text we did not fetch.