When licensing your creative work, your first decision is on
what kind of license to use. While most pro photographers are intimately
familiar with licensing, many newcomers and folk from other creative fields can
benefit from a quick introduction to the main type of creative licensing.
Simply put, a license is a legal contract that defines the
manner in which the license “buyer” can use your creative works. It’s important
to remember that the creator never actually “sells” their
creative work, but rather just provides the right for a buyer to use it in a
certain manner.
Rights Managed
Rights Managed licenses are used traditionally in the photography field and
virtually every factor about usage goes into calculating the price of the
license: duration, region, type of distribution, amount of distribution,
exclusivity, etc.
This model is favored by top pros because it is very specific and
ensures that a work's creator gets fair payment based on the value
derived by the client. Because of the complexity traditionally
associated with this type of license, this licensing model is often not used in
low priced transactions.
Royalty Free
Royalty Free licenses differ from Rights Managed licenses as they place
no limitations on usage or duration of usage on the part of the license buyer.
Generally, the only limitation is that buyers can not resell the image. In the
photography and video fields, pricing usually varies based on the
resolution of the piece that is bought (i.e. higher resolution images cost more
money).
Royalty Free is the licensing model typically used by the
many online stock photo sites. As such, Royalty Free has become associated in
some circles with “cheap” images. While this is true to some extent, you can still profit through the Royalty Free model if you are careful
about pricing and the locations through which you sell your work.
Rights Simple
Rights Simple is a model developed by ImageSpan whereby buyers get a license
for a specific use but are not limited by the industry or region in which they use
the work. In many ways this license is a hybrid of Royalty Free and Rights
Managed, providing many benefits of both.
In most cases, Rights Simple transactions of similar quality
are priced higher than Royalty Free and lower than Rights Managed.
Pricing is an interesting challenge. It’s worth
remembering that by pricing your works a bit higher, you are actually doing a service
for your clients. A higher priced image typically has less distribution than a
similar cheaper image, meaning that it is much less likely to be used in a
competitor’s site or publication. This is, of course, most true in the case of
exclusive Rights Managed images, where the buyer typically pays a large premium
for exclusive use of a creative work.
