It’s a pretty confusing subject sometimes, right? We’ll try to unravel some of that confusion.
Basically, in the United States, every time a photographer makes a photograph, it’s covered by copyright. Unless a photographer specifically signs something that says he doesn’t own the copyright, he does. We don’t even have to mention copyright in our contracts, and it’s still ours. We mention it in the contract as a reminder to our clients.
Turn Loose the Art is happy to grant our clients personal use rights. We’ve had a “Terms of Use” posted both on our proofing site and on the blog for a while, but I’ll also mention them here. The rights we grant our clients are to print images on their own for their own personal enjoyment. After you receive your disc of hi-res images, you are welcome to make copies of that disc for safekeeping, welcome to take it to Costco and make some prints for your scrapbook, and welcome to send a few prints to your grandma.
You aren’t allowed to sell or publish the images. This means, you can’t upload the images to snapfish, for example. You also are not allowed to upload the images to sites such as facebook or myspace — this is a form of publishing. We have probably already uploaded a few of our favorite images to facebook for you, likely the same images as on the blog. If you’d like to share more images with your friends and family, you have two options:
1. You can wait until your album is finished and you receive your disc, make a few prints, and share them that way.
2. You can direct them to our client viewing and ordering site where they can log in and see ALL your images. They can even make collections of their friends.
While we’re quite laidback about a lot of things, copyright is not one of them. It’s our livelihood as well as our passion!
1 comment
aga - Great, informative post!