Copyright free images

Writing on the MK Media Circle e-mail forum, photographer Kevin Sansbury poses the question in relation to the launch of a royalty free image site, ‘can someone explain what fees are given to the photographer when images are used. There is a trend that is killing the professional photographer that royalty free images are being used instead of commissioning a professional photographer.’ This raises an interesting issue, particularly in the industrial b-2-b PR space, as to whether the press release can stand the cost of a professional commission at all. Demonstrating the value of PR investment to smaller businesses is hard enough, plus the demand for an ‘editorial charge’ without the photographer fee on top. Interestingly the Pro-Talk web sites which carry vast numbers of industrial PR don’t publish images at all, whilst the printed journals reject most press releases due to limited space, in turn due to less advertising - so it is little surprise PR agencies are cautious about commissioning photography that may only be destined for the trash can. Interestingly a different conversation took place on the UKEPR forum towards the end of last year where a b-2-b PR agency had been hit with substantial royalty charges for using a modest image somewhere on their web site. Because such images can easily be lifted from the Internet and dropped into another web site does not imply they are royalty free and if they are the property of one of the large image libraries the chances are they will be tracked down and users invoiced. At Technical Marketing we have cautioned our clients to ensure they have the right to use images for publicity purposes and better still to use one of our online ImageBanks to store images online, along with copyright statements, captions and searchable descriptions.