Rights Managed (RM) photography give the licensee the ability to use a specific image in a specific way for a specific period of time. The price is generally calculated based on the following factors:
- Image usage (e.g. Commercial, Editorial, Digital, Internal, etc)
- Usage specs (e.g. image size, run size, duration, etc)
- Target market (e.g. one state, a country, worldwide)
Rights-Managed vs. Royalty-Free Photography
Like any piece of intellectual property (whether music, photography, software or a drug formula), the end user doesn’t own the underlying IP. When you buy a copy of Microsoft Office, you are buying a license to use the software on your computer. You can’t resell the software. You can’t use it on more than a couple of computers. And you don’t have the right to the computer code that underlies the program. Similarly, with photography, you are almost always buying a license to use the image in a specific way – not the underlying copyright, which would ostensibly allow you to do anything with the image.
In the mid-1990s, in lock step with the rise of desktop publishing, royalty free (RF) photography came on the scene in the form of CDs (and later DVDs) loaded with generic imagery, which was often of inferior quality to what you might find in a rights-managed catalog. But that distinction has generally been obliterated with the advent of digital photography and the internet. There is good and bad photography in both the RF and RM realm. But only RM licenses gives your organization exclusivity over an image.
Whether you’re using RM or RF images, you’re still bound by certain restrictions that govern how you can use an image.
Key Takeaways:
- Photography is a form of intellectual property
- Rights managed and royalty free licenses are two common licensing schemes in photography
- Rights managed photography is licensed based on a specific usage
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