As the owner of copyright of your work, nobody may use your work without permission.

If you pay for admission you create a contract with the owner, and terms of admission are often used to restrict or take rights in your photos. These are often stated in small print on the ticket itself so you cannot claim you were not made aware of the terms of the contract. Motorsport and other sports venues are particularly fond of these conditions, sometimes claiming all intellectual property rights of anything you create, but they crop up at music venues and all manner of other places. They are open to legal challenge, mainly on the grounds that they are unfair and/or that the terms were not stated before payment. It's worth remembering that a copyright assignment has to be in writing. But a court would ask why you didn't immediately return the ticket and ask for a refund if the terms were unacceptable. The safest course is to boycott such venues - and report them in the forums here, so others can do likewise.

'Moral rights' are certain legal rights under the 1988 Copyright Designs and Patents Act. They include

Creative Commons and other 'share-and-share-alike' licenses are sometimes called viral licenses, because they require anyone who creates a derivative work to apply an identical license to their new wo

As soon as you place your work on the public web, you lose the innocence of not having to pay any heed to copyright.

There are various ways in which a photograph or other artwork may 'derive' from another.

It is a legal framework for intellectual property, so inevitably it is a mechanism to regulate who owns what and who pays whom.

An included work is someone else's copyright material that appears in your photograph. Provided the inclusion is incidental, this does not infringe.

Copyleft is the generic name for licensing schemes that permit some free copying, adaptation or derivative work provided the copy is also issued with an identical licence.

Your photographs are your work and they are your asset. If you work as a professional photographer they are your only asset. Copyright is your title to that asset.