There can be umpteen activities one can do as a hobby. But, if someone wants to turn his/her hobby into a profession, he/she ought to be familiar with the term ‘licensing’.
Simply said, licensing means that you’re giving rights preferably to someone who pays you money in return to use your work for a certain purpose and for a specific period of time.
Today, we are going to talk on photography licensing. To understand photography licensing rights one must first understand that unless you are selling a print, you are not selling a photo as such. What you are doing is selling permission to someone to use that photograph in a certain way for a certain amount of time. This is called photography licensing.
While there are some basic common terms relating to licensing, there are as many different licensing situations as there are photographs. Understanding those basic common terms will help one understand more complex and customised terms as you endeavor to license your images.
What one has to do is to check with his/her lawyer for concrete answers to legal questions.
Now, let’s get a little deeper.
Commercial Rights
Commercial rights can be a very murky term when corporate lawyers get involved. However, a general the explanation would be that commercial means any endeavour designed to generate income or use by a commercial entity. Some examples would include a sales brochure, magazine, advertisement or billboard.
Commercial photography in India is definitely a licensing model but most photographers are not specific enough to avoid situations of conflict or simply because of their lack of confidence.
One of the major consequence of this reluctance is the increasing belief among clients that once they commission an assignment to a photographer they will have absolute claim on the images being clicked for that project. But! this is a misconception. Such acts of the clients can be considered as a serious violation as the copyright of the images lie with the photographer ad is strongly safeguarded under the provisions of the Copyright Act 1957.
Non-Commercial Rights
Non-commercial rights would be items that have not been designed to create significant income or use by individuals or other non-corporate type groups.
Things such as church bulletins or printing an image to put on a school binder would be known as non-commercial usage.
First Rights
When the word ‘first’ is placed in front of other rights, it simply means that the person purchasing these rights gets to publish/use the image before anyone else who has purchased license rights.
Serial Rights
Serial rights apply to magazines. This means that the magazine is licensing the right to use the image in magazine format. In other words, if you sell serial rights to a magazine A, you can’t sell the same rights to magazine B as well. Unless you only sell First rights, then you can sell more rights later.
Non-Exclusive Rights
One must watch out for this clause. Non-exclusive rights can be a reasonable license to sell, but they can also be a quick way to lose the use of one’s image. Non-exclusive rights mean that the licenser has a specific set of rights at the same time someone else has them as well. The problem is that this clause is usually followed with a large amount of specific rights and many companies use this type of clause to allow them to reprint and resell your work on their own.
One Time Use Rights
One time use rights are very easy to manage. One time use means that the entity buying the license can use your image for just one time for one specified project.
Finally, it is necessary for photographers and clients to understand that when a photographer quotes his/her fees for clicking ‘n’ number of images, he/she is not essentially agreeing to sell those images but in fact he/she is licensing those images to the client for a specific use.
