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2.2: Image Licensing

  • Page ID
    129697
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    Image Licensing for Commercial Use

    If you want to use an image to which you don’t own a copyright, you will need a licensing agreement with the copyright holder. There are many different types of rights and terms of use that can be specified in a licensing agreement. Make sure you know exactly how you plan to use a licensed image so that you can specify these uses in your agreement.

    Digital Rights

    Digital rights refer to the digital version of an image, rather than a physical print of the image. Having the digital rights to a photo means that you can distribute it anywhere in the digital world; however, you can only use if for commercial purposes if you also have the commercial rights.

    Commercial Rights

    If you plan to profit in anyway from using a licencsed image, you’ll need commercial rights to the image. Commercial rights are required for any uses that could result in monetary gain, including marketing, advertisements, or other promotions. Any image used to promote or sell for a brand should have commercial rights. This commercial designation also encompasses a broad scope of business uses, including blogs, email marketing campaigns, social media posts, and influencer-created content.

    Retail Rights and Personal Use

    Retail rights refer to any image or video content that is sold to the client or consumer. These include wedding photos, school yearbook pictures, and other pictures that are meant for personal use and circulation. With retail rights, you do not have the right to claim the work as your own, and, typically, you should attribute the work to the original photographer in some way. If you have the retail rights to an image and you’d like to use it commercially, you may be able to renegotiate with the photographer to obtain additional rights to the images.

    Social Rights

    Social rights are a combination of commercial and digital rights specific to images on social media platforms. With social rights, a brand/business has the right to repost a work on their social media; however, they do not necessarily have the right to alter the image or use it in paid ads. Images on social media are governed by the same copyright laws as everywhere else. However, social media users are accustomed to certain types of posting and sharing within the platform. This complicates how copyrights are enforced on social media. If you post an image that you own to social media, you still own the copyright to your image. Each social media platform is licensing the image when you post it on that site. By posting your photos on their site you are granting the right to display the image, in addition to any other rights that are specified in the user agreement for a social platform.


    This page titled 2.2: Image Licensing is shared under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Jennifer Vaughn (ASCCC Open Educational Resources Initiative (OERI)) .