6.4: Rights and Images

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Phase 4: Rights and Images

When you get ready to move towards publication, you should make a check that you have the rights to all content and images used. In the case of content created outside of your group, realize that in the US that any content created by an author is immediately copyrighted at the point of creation. Without explicit permission, you cannot use that content commercially.

Usually the content that ends up requiring that you source rights will be images or music. In these situations you will need to identify who holds the rights to the content you need and get permission from them. The rights holder may not be the person who created the content originally, as in the case where the rights have been sold to another individual or organization.

If you need to get high-quality content for your deliverables but don’t have resources available to create your own, you should investigate stock photo services that often have a range of photographs available to meet most generic project needs. In the case you need something specific, you may well need to generate content yourselves or pay someone to do the work professionally.

There are limited open-source and copyleft content sources that you can use to get free content, but as mentioned elsewhere in the text these sources can be sketchy at times and sometimes come with explicit limits on commercial use or with clauses that would then cause your own work to be open-access or copyleft. In a corporate environment especially, these types of constraints are dealbreakers.