Royalty-Free Images May Not be Liability-Free
Author of this post: John Kuraoka | About Blog Authors »
Perhaps you’ve seen this story making the rounds: A Texas teenager is suing Virgin Mobile because it used her image without permission in a billboard campaign in Australia.
The girl appears in a photograph which was released under a Creative Commons license. The photographer, via the license, expressly permitted commercial use of his image, as long as he received a photo credit. Virgin Mobile Australia duly credited the photographer when it used his photograph in the ad campaign. However, because the Creative Commons license does not apply to the likeness of the girl, who found her face being used to tout a mobile phone network halfway around the world, Virgin may still be in hot water.
A photographer is free to license his own work in whatever way he sees fit, but unless model and location releases were obtained, that license does not, by extension, cover the likenesses which appear in the image. How many photos on royalty-free photo sites come with model and/or location releases? Not many, last time I checked.
So, next time you turn to the royalty-free sites when sourcing images for your clients, ask yourself these questions:
Are there recognizable people in the images?
Are there recognizable locations? (Disneyland for example, or someone’s home.)
Are there recognizable branded objects?
Have the necessary releases been obtained for all of the above?
Fellow Notes on Design blogger and intellectual property attorney Jean Perwin may have better advice, but for me and many other designers I know, rights-managed images suddenly make a lot more sense.
October 18th, 2007 at 1:33 am
Should not photographers get a release form signed? This form should say that it will be sold or submitted on istock photos or something similar..
November 5th, 2007 at 2:57 pm
Personally, I feel a bit angry, if the photographers arn’t doing the correct paper works. We designers are left vournurable to any law suit.
November 22nd, 2007 at 4:52 am
But I cant’ get my head round if a photographer takes a photo of someone, then someone uses his image, how can he sue the person? Any compensation should go the person’s image he took right?
June 4th, 2008 at 11:57 pm
Images from any reputable stock agency will be accompanied by a model and property release if needed. Virgin got into hot water because they (or their contracted designers) took images from flickr. Flickr is not a stock photo company. As a photographer its been very gratifying to see this story unroll, when I first saw the poster campaign on the subway platforms here in Sydney I began to thing that advertising had reached a whole new depth - taking free images from the internet (and to be honest rather good ones! its was a cleaver campaign). In the end the poster campaign got exactly what it deserved, excellent media coverage for virginmobile, and a lot of trouble too.
June 24th, 2008 at 1:28 am
This is timely for me to find this post. I was just browsing a popular photo stock agency for a specific picture, which I thought I found. It does have a recognizable face on it. Now I will take precautions to find out if the appropriate releases were obtained. Sounds stupid, but I guess I just assumed this, since its on a site where people go specifically for photos. Good post and info…thanks!
September 2nd, 2008 at 8:25 am
Okay that’s great,
I am thinking royalty free is looking pretty attractive at this point, okay?
And it is attractive, from the “hassle quotient” on my point-of-view.
But in reality rights managed transactions are actually a little less hassle-intensive than you might imagine, while royalty free transactions are not completely “hassle free”: