Understanding licensing types: Rights Managed image licences
Rights managed licencing is the oldest (and some would say best) way of selling your work. Rights managed licences give you complete control over how to charge fairly for your work and can apply equally to commissioned work when pricing photography or stock library sales. Pricing rights managed commissioned work is the subject of another post later…
So what does a rights managed stock image license mean?
As the copyright holder of an image you are able to sell a licence to reproduce your work. If you are not sure what a photography licence is then I suggest you read this post here and then return to this page.
A rights managed licence (sometimes referred to as RM or L(for licenced)) specifies the media type, territory and duration of the use of your image. It allows you to price the cost of the licence based on usage alone.
The greater the usage, the greater the cost of the licence.
Stock libraries like Getty Images, Corbis, Alamy, Age etc. all have images that are rights managed. They are the premium sellers of their collections for a number of reasons and can make the photographer far greater returns than any Royalty Free images.
So do I have to have a super unique image with high production values to sell it Rights Managed?
- No. You can sell any image as rights managed as long as it has never been sold under a Royalty Free licence.
Why can’t I have the image as Royalty Free on one library and Rights Managed on another?
- Because a rights managed image has something very attractive to buyers that a Royalty Free image never has. A history of its usage. Most stock libraries will not allow you to place an image as rights managed if it has ever been sold as Royalty Free. This is to protect their buyers from buying an image with an unknown history. You are effectively managing the rights in your work with an auditable history trail.
When you sell a rights managed image through a stock library (or from your own site) you will know who you sold it to, the market sector of the end usage, the media it will be used in, the territories it will appear in, the duration it will appear for, what size it has been used at.
Here’s a typical report of a rights managed stock image sale from stock library Alamy:
Country: Netherlands
Usage: Editorial
Media: Consumer Magazine
Industry: Retail books/magazines/newspapers
Sub-Industry: Miscellaneous
Print run: up to 1 million
Placement: Inside
Image Size: 1/2 page
Start: 13 July 2007
End: 13 July 2007
The pricing of a rights managed image is incredibly fluid and is based purely on the media usage of the image and dependent upon all the factors in the list above. Change any one of those and the price of the image will go up or down.
If you are having trouble understanding this concept then here’s a link to a site where you can plug in some figures, then change them, and see the prices move: Stock Photo Price Calculator
Advantages for the buyer of a rights managed image
- image history is known so checks can be made to see if the image has been used in advertising by a competitor or already run by a rival magazine etc.
- pricing based purely on media usage so if a spot (tiny) use in a small circulation magazine is needed it can be more cost effective than buying a Royalty Free image that will never be used again
- added exclusivity can be bought on a rights-managed image turning into a rights-protected image to lock out competition from using the same image
Advantages for the seller of a rights managed image
- fair price paid for your work based on the usage – the more its used the more you earn! Your image may sell for £100 or £1000 or more – there’s no limit.
- ability to earn extra fees by offering image exclusivity as a rights protected image
- ability to control the usage of your image by placing restrictions on types of use you do not want to allow(useful when images of people are to be restricted from sensitive subjects i.e. tobacco advertising, sex industry etc etc.) – this can be a media sector, a country or a media type
Hopefully that’s given you an overview of how to sell images as rights managed and what that licence type means for your images.
PP
Tags: copyright, licences, licenses, Photography Business, rights managed, RM, Stock Photography, usage
