Originally posted by alohadave 
I'm not quite sure why you would think that the printer gets any kind of copyright protection for printing someone else's pictures. If you look at the TOS of any printing service, you'll see that you are essentially granting them a license to print the pictures that you submit, and that you are the copyright holder, or have authorization to print from the copyright holder. No rights are transferred.
Thanks for the clarification. From what other Canadians have stated, in cases like wedding photography, the copyright automatically goes to the client, but I don't know all the ins-and-outs of Canadian law.
I don't do weddings, but I guess it would depend how it was sold. As far as I know unless stated otherwise in the contract the Image rights are retained by the photographer. there have been some changes in copyright law up here though and i may have missed it (Really i would only shoot a wedding as a favour to a friend, and then only if it sounded interesting. Just not my thing)
And it's a good thing copyright doesn't transfer to the printer, can you imagine the havoc that would cause lol. It's been a tough transition from film to digital killing a lot of labs to start with. If this was true every prop print lab would be out of business inside of a month, but Epson and Canon and the other big printer manufacturers would have the best month ever (I could almost see them lobbying for this lol)
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