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Copyright law prohibits photo labs from making prints of any image that is not owned by the customer in question. A combination of the ever improving technology built into digital cameras, the fall in the price of high-end cameras and the so-called digital SLRs, and the increasing use of Photoshop and other software packages to retouch and enhance images, is creating end results that are difficult to distinguish from the work of a professional.

In the pre-digital age, copyright was easy to determine: if you were in possession of the negative then in all likelihood you owned the photograph. Now that anyone can download images from the Internet, simply submitting them digitally proves nothing, so photo

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labs are erring in the side of caution.

Kodak has a gallery of professionally taken pictures on the walls of its EasyShare Gallery labs to warn its workers of the 'telltale signs' that a professional has been at work. Among the images commonly submitted by customers but taken by a pro are school photos and those posed, studio images of children.

'The majority of them are easy to spot,' said David Rich, vice president of marketing. 'We're doing our job as a good corporate citizen to protect the rights of others, just like we want our brand and our copyright to be protected.'

Currently this practice is largely confined to the US but European labs take an equally dim view of copyright infringement and encourage users to ensure that they read photo services' terms and conditions before uploading images.

There have been calls for a change in copyright laws to facilitate digital distribution, but this has yet to happen. The alternative is for professional photographers to increase their charges in exchange for giving away the image rights to their customers, but this would require some sort of copyright certification that is recognised by the various labs and such a scheme is a long way off, if not entirely impractical given the vast numbers of professional photographers.