Tag: licensing

Copyright, Licensing and Model Releases

Jason1 Comment

One of the questions I’ve gotten since releasing the DIY Legal Kit surrounds the sometimes confusing matter of photographer copyright protection versus licensing, and model releases. As the Legal Kit is designed to be the forms needed to cover each of these bases, the delivery was intended for those with a solid understanding of each principle.

However, soon after launch, I realized that the “solid understanding” was not necessarily present, so figured a bit more background would be helpful.  For those of you who already purchased the kit, an upcoming supplemental will be released to you free of charge.  For those of you who would like to get the primer separately though, that will also be made available to give you the primer you need to understand all these nuances.  For now though, I thought it might be helpful to give a bit of an introduction to the concepts here on the blog.  It’s a confusing issue for sure, and one that does warrant a bit of discussion.

Copyright Protection

Copyright protection refers to the rights of an artist to control the distribution of works they create.  Whether you are a painter, a writer, a sculptor, or a photographer, you have the right to control distribution of your own work.  Registering your work with the federal copyright office entitles you not only to the protection of copyright, but also to legal remedies for damages in the event someone tries to use your work without your permission.  The supplemental will cover the process for registering your work with the Federal Copyright Office and answer some of the more common questions there.

Model Release

A model release means a person is signing over the right to produce the image they have been captured in to the photographer.  A photographer may own the copyright to a photograph, but a person also has the right to control their own likeness.  If you do not want a photographer to produce your image in any commercial setting, simply do not sign the model release.  If you are a model, you probably want your image to be used to gain notariety.  So, to do that, you need to release the right to produce images of you to the photographer.

There are always circumstances that can raise questions though.  For instance, does an attendee at a wedding inherently give the photographer the right to use their image?  It was only the bride and groom that hired the photographer, not the attendees!  What about someone who is out on the street taking portraits for $5 a pop?  If you buy the photo, does that grant the photographer the right to use your image?  Not necessarily!  The supplemental answers these types of questions too.

Licensing Your Photos

Probably one of the biggest misconceptions I see around the field of photography, is that clients (and some photographers) see the product as what they are selling, not the service.  The truth of the matter is that as a photographer, it’s more common to get compensation for the service than the photos themselves.  Obtaining a photo, or using a photo afterwards is what’s referred to as licensing.

So, the question naturally comes up from wedding and event photographers – does this mean a couple needs to also pay for the photo album?  The answer is – (as always) “It depends!”  If your pricing structure includes a CD to re-print then no.  If your pricing includes a photo album, then yes!  What about Facebook and Twitter, along with a host of other social media sharing sites?  Are those included?  How does this differ from corporate or studio sessions for head shots or architectural and fine art prints?  These are all great questions and the answers to these and many others will all be included  in the forthcoming supplemental.

Hopefully this has helped answer some of the basic ones that people have had regarding the Legal Kit forms.  The last question you may have at this point is what is included in the DIY Legal Kit itself.  Here’s what you get in the Basic Legal Kit:

  1. Both an adult and minor model release forms (and is accepted at most stock agencies, including iStock, Getty, and Alamy)
  2. A standard event contract
  3. A standard licensing agreement
  4. Schedule A (which itemizes the list of photos included in the agreement)
  5. Schedule B (which covers the terms of usage).

The thing that’s super cool about these forms in the basic kit is that they are designed so you can add your own logo, company graphic and other design styles to the forms to suit your personal preferences.  They are in standard Word format so you can easily modify them as needed for your locality if desired, rather than the more difficult PDF format that is more common with other Legal Kits of forms.

These all were created by a licensed and practicing attorney here in Colorado, with the intent to make them as applicable as possible in most municipalities.  If you do have concerns though, feel free to consult with an attorney in your own area.  As an aside, it’s always cheaper to review existing forms and documents than to have them create ones from scratch for you!

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So, if you haven’t gotten the Legal Kit yet, feel free to pick up a copy now: https://canonblogger.com/education/ebooks/

A Primer on Licensing Your Work

Jason1 Comment

With so many people likely covering the CS5 launch event later today (http://cs5launch.adobe.com/), I thought I’d take a different tack on things, since the launch really is just talking about when it will be available.  (In other words, everything you hear today will be nothing more than hype and PR excitement.  Nothing to really sink your teeth into…except pricing, which has already been leaked):

  • CS5 Regular Price is $699 for the full version and $149 for the upgrade…
  • CS5 Extended Pric is $999 and $349 respectively…

So, for something to sink your teeth into – here’s the latest short of an larger article I am working on that covers the exciting, heart-stopping, living on the edge, never-say-die, run ’til you drop matter of…

Photography Licensing

Okay, so maybe it’s not that exciting, but think about licensing for a minute.  There are so many terms bandied about when it comes to licensing and usage, fees and rights, that it can be very difficult to navigate the jungle of not only what to charge, but which licensing approach will work best for you and your style of work.  Well, fear not fellow photogs!  Today, I’m going to take a look at some of the basic concepts and  terminology of licensing.  While this is not legal advice, consider it a resource that you can use as a springboard or basis for understanding.

First off, let’s get a handle on what exactly the term “licensing” means.  Licensing (in a very general sense) means that you are giving permission to print your work.  Whether that permission is granted to an individual or a company can define particular licensing options for you, in the end, it’s permission to re-print or re-use your work that licensing grants the buyer.  (Yes, this means you as the photographer are the seller!)  Also, as a general rule, if the buyer wants to use your work a lot (say National Geographic wants to print it in their magazine, on their website, and include in videos and email flyers) then you can usually command a higher price than someone who just wants to buy a single print of your work (smaller usage).  So, more use equates to a higher fee.

Now that we know what licensing is, and how pricing in general is structured, let’s take a look at some of the more common forms of licensing that you will see.  There are several categories of licensing and it can get confusing when you start to cross categories, so let’s talk about categories first, so we can distinguish all the elements involved.  The first categorization generally used is between  commercial use and non-commercial use.  Other categorizations include Rights Managed and Royalty Free.  Before delving into details on other types of licensing available, let’s cover briefly what each of these means.

Commercial Licensing

Commercial licensing means that whoever is purchasing wants to turn around and make money off your images.  They are likely going to redistribute usually in the form of print publications like magazines, corporate papers (like annual reports, brochures, and other types of media that is distributed to a decent sized audience like their stockholders, prospective clients, etc.).  As a general rule of thumb, the wider the distribution (more copies of your pictures are being printed/used), the higher the fee for usage.

Non-Commercial Licensing

Conversely, a non-commercial usage generally means that the use is not going to be generating any money for the person/company that is buying the license.  It also means that the image purchase will not be redistributed elsewhere and this is usually part of the terms of the license.  Here, a good example would be a medical office buying an image to hang on their wall, a church making a flyer, or some other instance like that.  Since this is a much narrower distribution (a.k.a. usage), the fee will not be as high as it would for commercial work.

If you think  that was a lot of reading, there’s so much more!  Licensing can be customized for pretty much any use by an attorney!  You can cross any of these and get a literal jungle of licensing protocols, including others like First Use, One Time Use, and much more!  Attorneys are available that specialize in licensing and copyright.  If you really want to get into the nitty gritty talk with them!  This is just a beginning dialog…

Speaking of dialogs – got any stories of licensing or copyright that helped save your bacon?  I’ve read a few in the NAPP forums, and from several other outlets too.  Feel free to share your own thoughts and questions in the comments or via email!  Who knows – the podcast that’s coming out soon may feature a question or two! 🙂

In the meantime, keep on shooting, and we’ll see you back here again tomorrow!

License Lockout

Jason4 Comments

First off, a bit of quick news about the blog in general:  the layout has changed.  Can anyone tell the difference?  It’s a rather significant one, so hopefully it won’t go unnoticed! 🙂  Chime in and that’s your chance at winning the Think Tank Photo Streetwalker bag I reviewed a few weeks ago right here on the blog!

So, back on today’s post topic, as part of my maintenance routine that I recently posted, last evening I was doing some of my extended “IT” maintenance on my Windows computer.  As a part of that maintenance, I was trying to optimize my hard drive performance, and thus resorted to cleaning out temp files, cache files, history files, restore points, and other sundry stuff.  A defrag procedure on the hard drive, and I was back up to some pretty screaming speeds again.  Puffing out the chest at getting a 5 year old Dell running a 2.4 Ghz Celeron processor, Windows XP, and 2 GB of RAM to move that fast without over-clocking, I checked off on what I thought was a job well done.

Then I opened Photoshop:

CS3 Error

Uh oh – it seems I cleaned things out a little too much.  Well, since I have diligently kept all my media, documentation, license#’s and other information in multiple places, I was easily able to find the needed materials to re-install.  But, here’s the thing – that would require importing all my actions again, re-installing other elements like Noise Ninja, and then also go in and customize all the features I like (scrolling with my mouse to zoom in and out of the image, curves menu with more lines, etc.)  Who wants to do all that?  Well, not me!  So, off to Google I went.

That five minutes on Google doing some research saved me probably two hours of software maintenance time.  Adobe has a neat little utility that can be downloaded and run when things like this happen to restore your licensing info without having to go through the entire re-installation.  Not sure what it does or how it does it, but the utility is very handy, so I thought to share it with the reading audience today.  Here’s the download link, and supporting reading materials.

Licensing Service Update

The underlying point here though, is that even the extensive maintenance I itemized the other day does not cover everything.  Go into Photoshop, copy your preferences down via image pastes into a Word doc or other such format.  Make a copy of your plugins folder external to PS – the same goes for Actions, noise removal, automation tasks, brushes, etc., etc., etc.!  With as advanced and complex has an application like Photoshop has become – you can save a ton of time if you take some proactive measures.

What do you save from your Photoshop configuration settings?  Share your ideas in the comments!  As always, thanks for tuning in, keep on shooting, and we’ll see you back here tomorrow – Thursday Thoughts returns again with Chris Breedlove!