The NPPA holds annual competitions as well as several quarterly contests, seminars, and workshops designed to stimulate personal growth in its members.

The organization also offers a critique service, a job bank, an online discussion board, and various member benefits.

Their members include still and television photographers, editors, students and representatives of businesses that serve the photojournalism industry.

When Olive asked the University to pay for the use, they refused and told him they were shielded from suit because of sovereign immunity, which protects state government entities from many lawsuits.

[7][8][9][10] In 2015, the state government of North Carolina uploaded videos of the wreck of the Queen Anne's Revenge to its website without permission.

As a result Nautilus Productions, the company documenting the recovery since 1998, filed suit in federal court over copyright violations and the passage of "Blackbeard's Law" by the North Carolina legislature.

[11][12][13] Before posting the videos the North Carolina Legislature passed "Blackbeard's Law", N.C. Gen Stat §121-25(b), which stated, "All photographs, video recordings, or other documentary materials of a derelict vessel or shipwreck or its contents, relics, artifacts, or historic materials in the custody of any agency of North Carolina government or its subdivisions shall be a public record pursuant to Chapter 132 of the General Statutes.

[18][19][20] Those briefs proposed various doctrines under which the CRCA could validly abrogate sovereign immunity and variously re-asserted and supported the reasons why Congress examined and enacted CRCA, claiming that Congress was fair in finding that states had abused immunity and that an alternative remedy was needed.