thephotographybiz.com

Following on from my last post about the licencing types that offer buyers rights protection and exclusivity on the usage of your images its important to understand how to add restrictions so that the image is ‘locked’ and unable to be sold for the exclusive rights to other would-be purchasers.

Hang on…. why would anyone want to restrict the saleability of their images? Isn’t that nuts? Are you insane PP?

There are some very good reasons why you may need to restrict sales. Lets take a look at one of them:

The rights protected or exclusivity restriction

Let’s assume you have a rights managed image that you have placed with three non-exclusive** stock photo libraries. You have indicated that you are happy to sell exclusivity on the image if a buyer requests it and each library offers its customers exclusivity (some don’t).

**non-exclusive in this sense means a library that does not demand exclusive sale rights for your image so you are free to place them elsewhere on other libraries

One day you are checking the sales notifications of one of your libraries and hey presto, one of them posts a rights protected exclusive sale:

Here are the details:

Country: Germany
Usage: Advertising/Promotion
Media: Consumer Magazine – Advertising
Industry: Leisure/Entertainment/Sport
Sub-Industry: Gaming and Gambling
Print run: up to 25,000
Image Size: 1 page
Start: 09 November 2006
End: 09 February 2007

The library has indicated that the buyer has bought exclusivity in their industry sector for consumer magazine – advertising for the duration of the licence.

Great news on the RP sale. But why does that affect me?

• If you have sold exclusivity then you can’t sell the same rights to another client else there would not be exclusivity!

So what do I have to do?

• You’ll need to add restrictions to the image you sold exclusive rights for on all your other libraries that are selling that image (whether they offer rights protection or not). This will ensure your buyer gets the exclusivity they have paid for.

Most online libraries dealing with rights managed images will have a part of their administration screen where you can add restrictions to cover the exclusive rights and lock out other buyers.

In our case above we sold exclusive rights for:

Advertising use in the Leisure Entertainment and Sport industry in German consumer magazines for 3 months

For example: On Alamy you can add the restrictions via a series of drop down menus on the edit image screen here:

I have filled in the boxes to reflect the exclusivity we sold on our licenced sale - click to see detail

Notice there is no time period to select. You will need to keep a note of the time the exclusivity expires so you can go and lift the restrictions using the same screen.

**You’ll need to do this if you sell exclusive rights via your own website direct to a buyer too. Any time you sell exclusivity on a rights managed image you must add restrictions wherever the same image is for sale to prevent other buyers from using the image for the type, industry and period of the restriction**

Next post will deal with Sensitive uses restrictions.

PP