The majority of promotional materials produced by businesses small and large feature photographs — not only of a company’s products or facilities, but also of things, people and places the company hopes will appeal to the target audience. Here James Leal-Valias, Creative Director at iStockphoto talks us through all we need to know about how to use images safely and legally and the options available to get the right images at the right price for your business.
Some enterprising business owners shoot their own products; others hire photographers or find existing images that fit a given subject. How do you determine which option is right for your next business promotion?
Thanks to search engines like Google Images, finding relevant and entertaining multimedia is extremely easy. But just because you can find it, cut it, copy it and paste doesn’t mean you have the legal (or ethical) right to use it without permission. All images are subject to copyright, whether or not they are marked as such. And, contrary to popular misconception, just because someone decides to post an image online does not mean they have chosen to relinquish their copyright.
Some business owners have found out the hard way that copying an image from someone’s website and using it online and in print can lead to troubles ranging from poor printing quality to a copyright or trademark infringement lawsuit. Yet the process of sourcing images does not have to be complicated as long as you have a basic understanding of the legal and technical issues involved.
Image copyright basics
Image ownership and licensing
The most common problem executives face when looking for suitable photographs is not understanding image ownership — or the copyright laws governing reuse of existing images. The principle to remember is that images are someone else’s intellectual property and cannot be used without obtaining the copyright holder’s permission and abiding by the negotiated terms of image use.
The latter is commonly referred to as a license, which spells out compensation, duration of use, and other such criteria negotiated between image buyer and owner in much the same fashion as any other business transaction.
Locating the image owner and securing permission is an absolute must, because using the image without a clear license to do so constitutes copyright infringement with very few exceptions. If sued for copyright infringement, a business using an unlicensed image may be liable for paying the copyright owner a sum that includes multiples of the original license fee plus attorney’s fees and damages that can seem astronomical by comparison.
Usage Considerations
By shooting your own photography or using properly licensed images shot by others, you can easily overcome the issue of copyright infringement. However, it is important to know that, beyond copyright, there are a number of other intellectual property and privacy issues that also must be considered – particularly if the image is going to be used for commercial purposes.
Images that contain logos, trademarks, company names or even specific buildings, product designs or landmarks may not be used in a commercial way. Also, if a recognisable person is in the image, that person needs to have given permission for their likeness to be used.
Search Engines and Photo-Sharing Web Sites
Given the necessity of dealing directly with the copyright owner, using a search engine to find a photo of a scrumptious cake that wholly embodies your bakery can be problematic. Google Images will certainly find thousands of photos, but it generally does not provide any information about who owns the image or how to contact them.
Pricing and licensing terms for images found via search engines and photo-sharing sites will vary greatly, and any comparison shopping will require finding several different sources for similar images, greatly increasing the amount of work you would have to put in to settle on the final photo for your project.
The stock agency benefit
Given the difficulty involved in locating suitable images through online sources, it is easy to see why there has been such an explosive growth in specialised stock photography agencies in recent years.
Stock imagery is created specifically for the purpose of being used by publishers, marketers, advertisers and others for both commercial and non-commercial purposes. You can find a few free or very low-cost sites for simpler projects, such as Stock.xchng, or Photos.com. For consistent use, important projects, international subjects and heavily art-directed content, sites such as iStockphoto carefully inspect every image they sell to ensure they meet extremely high quality standards. iStock also guarantees that its creative files do not violate any copyright, moral right, trademark and other intellectual property laws or guidelines.
Images available through stock-image companies such as iStockphoto, its parent company Getty Images and others are available for instant download in various resolutions, under clear licensing terms and with appropriate model and property releases, instantly eliminating the most common issues.
There are also numerous other benefits. Using a stock agency makes it easy to compare different creative executions of the same concept, because an agency offers work by numerous photographers in one location, keyworded and categorised specifically to make it easy for a buyer to locate and compare different images of the same subject matter. The ability to comparison-shop on one website speeds up the overall process: whereas it can take days or weeks to complete one image transaction that started on a search engine, using a stock site can reduce this process to mere minutes.
When using stock agencies, bear in mind that the quality of an agency’s search engine and available additional tools can greatly improve an image buyer’s search experience. For example, iStockphoto offers users several unique features. One is CopySpace, which finds images that contain space for text in a particular location within a photo’s overall composition.
The iStock search engine also provides a localised experience, enabling UK users to view images that are uniquely applicable to their local context—and entirely different from images seen by users, for example, from Germany, the US or elsewhere.
Whichever website you prefer, using a stock agency can greatly simplify the image-sourcing process. Some stock agencies can also help you integrate and get the most out of using sound, video and Flash files, which have long been the domain of big-budget advertisers and have only recently become accessible to SMEs.
If you have further questions or concerns about image use, please visit www.stockphotorights.com, set up by Getty Images for the benefit of the photographic industry and its customers.
