Product Licensing & Usage

Image licensing can be convoluted. Lawyers specialize in it - always a bad sign. The following is intended to provide a broad outline only and not a substitute for specific legal advice. In the good old days, you could pretty much photograph and sell anything within reasonable bounds of taste and common sense. However, in crept concerns about privacy, even in public places, and then issues about photographers making money selling images that people and property happened to be the subject of - or even incidentally included in. Then logos went off-limits despite their being plastered all over to get publicity. It offended the owners that someone might gain from a photograph that included their precious logo, or building, or self. Now you can't sell a picture of the Eiffel Tower at night because someone owns the light display with which it is festooned. You can't sell a picture of the lone cypress at Pebble Beach, someone now owns it. Nor can you of the Transamerica Pyramid Tower in San Francisco. You can if you get permission but you are at the whim of the 'owners.' There are subtle work-arounds whereby you can sell a photograph of the San Francisco skyline which includes the Transamericana but it cannot be deemed a main feature or they will be angry.

So you need permission, a 'release', from the model, if its is a person and from the owner if it is a piece of property - building, pet, yacht or whatever - if the end use is some form of commercial application - advertising, for example. However, the same photo can be sold, without a release, as fine art or for editorial uses such as an illustration for a news story or an informative article in a magazine, newsletter or the like. In the US, the First Amendment protects such usages as free speech. Other jurisdictions are roughly similar but you are warned to be careful, think of France.

Images, then, fall into two categories: Royalty-free or Rights Managed. The first test is whether the image meets the Royalty-free criteria.

To be Royalty-free, an image must have neither identifiable people nor private property appearing in it or, if they do, have releases from any people featured in it and from property owners whose property appears in it. Public property automatically meets the Royalty-free criteria.

If a photo does not meet the Royalty-free restrictions, it can generally still be sold as fine art or under a Rights Managed license. The Rights Managed category restricts the use of the photo by the purchaser to those editorial and educational uses cited above and such a photo cannot be sold Royalty-free.

Once a given photo has been established with Royalty-free status, the photographer, who owns the copyright, gets to say how it will be marketed. Thus a photo with Royalty-free status can still wind up on the market as a Rights Managed commodity. The choice has to do with the nature of the image and the fee structure of the two categories.

Royalty-free (RF)

With royalty-free images, you pay a single licensing fee which under normal circumstances is your initial "purchase" fee. You may then use images in as many projects, as often as you like and for as long as you like. Generally, you may use the purchased image personally or for clients, in:

Rights-managed (RM)

Rights-managed images offer greater exclusivity to designers and their client due to their restricted, limited-time usage agreements and rights protection in some instances. Images which include identifiable persons or property as described above can be used under Rights-managed licenses which will restrict the use of the image to those 'editorial' applications as outlined above. Fine art, including prints, wall art and so on are generally sold as such for the use and enjoyment of the purchaser but may not to be reproduced for sale. A local car dealer, for example, might purchase a print of a local scene for their dealership but unless specifically licensed cannot pass copies along to other dealerships, or anyone else for that matter, without breaking the Rights Managed license and the copyright.

Rights-managed licenses stipulate the limits of the end use, number of times they may be used etc. Typically, newspapers, magazines, annual reports, newsletters, brochures and so on pay for the use of images based on the circulation of the publication, region of circulation, size of image (full page, 1/4 page etc) and whether it will appear on the cover, back or inside the publication and other factors. Setting the price is, therefor, a more complicated computation and requires rather more user information than an outright Royalty Free image sale typically involves.