Understanding licensing types: Rights Ready Image licences
Rights ready image licences are a recent invention by stock photography library Getty Images. Introduced at the back end of 2006 to coincide with a new collection called ‘Lifesize’, Getty positioned this new licence type firmly between the traditional rights managed and royalty free licence types.
So what does a rights ready 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.
Rights ready still works on the concept of usage. The greater the use, the greater the fee to the agency and photographer. But with rights ready (or RR for short) the multitude of uses one could licence an RM image for (combinations of media use, territoriy & time) are predefined into several categories of use.
Each usage category of carries its own pricing and the time limit for usage is fixed at 10 years.
So RR is still, in essence, rights managed but a simpler variant and cheaper cost for the image buyer with a longer fixed usage period.
There are three main RR usage categories:
- Internal use
- Editorial use
- Commercial use
Editorial and Commercial use categories are further subdivided into:
Editorial:
- inside placement or back-cover
- front cover
- web or electronic broadcast media (editorial)
Commercial:
- printed marketing material or product packaging
- web or electronic broadcast media (commercial)
- print advertisement or display
- all commercial uses (all of the above)
An image buyer simply selects one or more categories that they need and pays the flat-price fee associated. They then get to use the image within those categores as many times as they want (just like RF licences) but for a 10 year period.
At the time of writing only Getty Images are using a model such as this. RR will only affect you if you are a Getty contributor with images in one of the RR collections like Lifesize or Riser.
I expect it to filter into mainstream use by other libraries (called something different!) eventually should it become a success.
PP
