Digital Signature Portrait Photography Contract Made Easy

Adapt image license

Today I'm going to talk about the most exciting subject in all of photography... licensing. I've studied photography since 2005 when I first started out as a professional photographer And I have a pretty solid understanding of how licensing works and I thought you all might be interested and hearing this information Full disclosure. I'm not an attorney. This isn't legal advice. This is really just a very Paraphrased explanation of how I've come to understand it over the years and U.S. Copyright law is pretty complicated. But as it relates to photography what it says is that it basically states that somebody who takes a photo that Person is the exclusive owner of that photo immediately. They own the copyright. They have the right to reproduce and Redistribute that photograph however, they want and they can display it However, they want as well now to avoid copyright infringement The way you would allow people to use your photos for commercial purposes such as a real estate listing is through licensing Now this all gets pretty complicated and I'm going to start off by using an analogy like music It translates pretty well so now when you purchase a song on iTunes for $0.99 You're not buying that song. You don't own the song you're buying a license to download and use that song for personal use When I make a video for real estate I have to license that song each time and there's going to be a fee associated with that each time that I pay for if you want to use an extreme example that everybody's familiar with if You're a car company and you want to use 30 seconds of that song "Like a Rock" to sell your trucks You have to license that 30 seconds of that song for that specific use and at that point you're talking hundreds of thousands of dollars in licensing fees Basically the same principles apply to photography. If you hire a photographer to photograph your family, for example You're gonna pay a relatively low fee like a hundred to five hundred dollars Depending where you're at just to be able to hang those photos in your home or share them on social media But you wouldn't be able to take those photos and sell them to a company like Starbucks for example for an ad campaign They'd actually need to License those photos from the photographer. And of course the photographer would have to get your written consent But legally the photographer owns the copyright and not the family. When it comes to real estate photography It's very similar and it really all boils down to the amount of images and the use or distribution And ultimately the value of those images or the potential return on investment of those images. Now on the higher end you have commercial marketing campaigns for larger brands where the images are going to be used for Magazines large print etc Typically those...