As many of our product photography clients are small businesses without legal teams and ad agencies, we’ve made our standard usage license extremely generous, to allow you to use them in any normal business capacity.

Each image is licensed exclusively to your company and may be used for any web advertising purpose (eCommerce sales, website, social media, etc), as well as internal print usage (product packaging, instruction booklets, brochures).

Extended licensing is also available for editorial and large print use (magazine or billboard advertising, as well as television and print displays as well. All extended licenses are billed at market rates (which is far too extensive to explain in full here, but drop us a line and we can put together a quotation for you!)

Can I have the full photo copyrights?

Photography copyrights and usage licenses are a hot button issue with many clients. In truth, photography usage licenses and copyrights work exactly the same as copyright and usage laws for movies and music.

When you purchase a Taylor Swift CD from the store, do you now own the copyrights to her music? Of course not. Likewise, if you purchase a Star Wars Blu Ray, do you now expect to own the copyright for Star Wars? Again, of course not.

When you purchase a CD, a DVD or hire a photographer to make images, what you are actually purchasing is a license to use that media in very specific ways. You can enjoy Taylor Swift in your CD player, but you wouldn’t expect to be able to use her music in a movie without paying for a new license, correct? In fact, you likely could not even use the music in a Youtube video.

If you read the usage licenses for movies, you technically cannot even display the movie for an audience without paying royalties (which is why you almost never see restaurants playing DVD or Blue Ray movies).

The same holds true for photography. A fact that most (even many photographers) do not realize is that, unless otherwise indicated, every photo is instantly copyrighted to the person who took the photo and protected by U.S. Copyright law, regardless of who or what the photo is of and whose camera took the photo.

If we hand you one of our cameras and you press the shutter release button, that photo is copyrighted to you, despite the camera and memory card belonging to us. A photo does not even require special paperwork or registration with the U.S. Copyright office.

Transferring copyright to a client means that we relinquish all rights to the photos, including our right to display the photos on our website. If we transfer our copyright via what’s known as a ‘copyright buyout’, we would need to remove them from our own portfolio as well.

A distinct advantage to us maintaining the copyright is that, when and if your images are stolen by another website or company (which happens very often), we can perform a DMCA takedown and have resources in place to see the images removed within hours or, at most, a couple of days. Pretty cool, right?