Photography is an extremely popular activity, with photographers ranging in skill from professional artist to your buddy with the smartphone. But there's one thing all photographers have in common across all levels of interest and professionalism: They need to know their intellectual property rights, as well as how to refrain from infringing on the rights of others.
To that effect, let's take a look at some of the intellectual property forms photographers should use in certain circumstances -- but first, let's look at your rights as a photographer.
Your Legal Rights
Generally, when a person creates a photograph, a painting, or anything else that has "original authorship" and has been "affixed in a tangible medium" (meaning that it physically or digitally exists), that person automatically owns the right to that intellectual property. A photographer, generally, can do whatever he or she wishes with their photos.
However, when the subjects in those photos are human beings, and when one person takes the picture at someone else's request, things get slightly more complicated.
Work For Hire Agreement
If you're an event or contract photographer, you're likely already familiar with the work for hire agreement. This form is often used when someone hires a photographer to take certain photographs. If I commission someone to shoot my wedding photography, and I want to own the intellectual property to those photographs, while they would ordinarily be the property of the photographer (who would license them to me to make copies of but still retain the rights to the images themselves), we could both sign a work for hire agreement to solidify our agreement before the project has even begun.
*Note on work for hire agreements: these forms may be unnecessary in an employer/employee situation; an employer owns the intellectual property of anything its employees create during the scope of their employment.
Copyright Transfer Agreement
If a work for hire agreement wasn't signed, the photographs are the property of the photographer -- but a copyright transfer agreement could move copyright ownership from one party to the other after the fact. Of course, at this point, both parties must agree on the transfer; this is why a work for hire agreement is so crucial -- to avoid messy arguments over intellectual property ownership.
A copyright transfer agreement isn't just for commissioned event photographers who have forgotten their work for hire form. Freelance photographers often transfer rights to their photographs to magazines or other periodicals in exchange for money -- they take photographs on their own, and then sell them along with the copyright.
Copyright Licensing Agreement
It isn't always necessary to sign over the rights to your photography -- photographers can benefit from a copyright licensing agreement to retain control over the intellectual property, but allow another party to use the picture for a specific purpose: advertisement, for example, or on a billboard. The person holding the license must adhere to the terms of it, and when any set time frame is up, he or she has no further rights to the photos and must ask the photographer again to license it.
Creative Commons License
A special type of license is the Creative Commons license. Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization dedicated to the idea that freely sharing intellectual property leads to more innovation and creativity than stifling it, and they have created six layers of licenses that facilitate this.
These licenses allow anyone to use your photographs without needing to obtain your permission first. Once license requires only that the author is credited; another also specifies that it cannot be used for commercial purposes; others are combinations of these and other requirements.
*Note on Creative Commons licenses: It is crucial that you make a carefully considered decision before placing a Creative Commons license on your work. Even if you revoke the license, anyone who has obtained the photograph under the license before you did so can use your work according to those terms for as long as they'd like.
Sarah Kolb - Business incorporation and copyright registration specialist. Freelance book editor. Senior content editor/writer.
