Best Business Practices for Photographers [210]
Immediate Access to Images Means Sure Sales in a Pinch
The production of images and their proper keywording and captioning means that within a few moments, your clients should be able to locate and license images from you. In addition, you should be able to locate your images within your own office archives. The ability to do so can mean the difference between a license and a loss. There are a number of solutions, but I have come to the conclusion that the software offered by Controlled Vocabulary (www.ControlledVocabulary.com) for less than $100 is among the best to generate keywords.
Chapter 26 Licensing Your Work
Licensing is probably the single most important part of the revenue-generation segment of your business. If you succumbed to the contract that reads "you hereby transfer all right title and interest in your assignment images, including copyright, and further hereby acknowledge that your work shall be deemed a work-made-for-hire," then licensing your work is irrelevant to you but will be highly relevant to the person or company who hired you. You are nothing more than a day laborer in this cycle. You may, then, skip this chapter. To make matters clearer and more direct: Since licensing photography is the essence of your business, so-called "day laborers" could skip the book entirely.
In the previous chapter, I provided a few insights and workarounds to the work-made-for-hire issue. Now, I will put forth additional solutions for consideration using the licensing concept. Here's the problematic paragraph, to refresh your memory:
Photographer hereby agrees to deem work produced under this agreement "work made for hire," or, if the work produced under this agreement cannot be deemed a "work made for hire," agrees to transfer copyright of the work to Client, provided that Client grants to photographer the right to use the work produced for self-promotional purposes.
Or, suppose you are working for a client that wants copyright but does not care if you want to license the images for editorial uses. This type of agreement sometimes comes into play when you are photographing celebrities for some clients. Since you cannot ever do anything with the images commercially without model releases, or perhaps the client sees that your sale of the images for editorial purposes would be beneficial and serve as additional promotion of those depicted in the images, they might agree to the following language:
Photographer hereby agrees to deem work produced under this agreement "work made for hire," or, if the work produced under this agreement cannot be deemed a "work made for hire," agrees to transfer copyright of the work to Client, provided that Client grants to photographer the right to use the work produced for self-promotional purposes, and for all editorial licensing, in perpetuity.
Defining the World of Licensing
If your best client came to you and said, "Learn Spanish, or you're no longer going to get hired by us," would you? If your best client came to you and said, "The slang and odd language you use isn't conducive to a constructive dialog when we're working together. If you can't speak proper English, we won't be able to work together anymore," would you drop the street talk and keep the client?
If you answered no to either of those questions, you need to think again. This is business, and if you want to do business (and keep doing business), you need to set aside any attitudes like that and realize that businesses do whatever they can to keep their clients. It's not personal or an affront to you, it's just business.
When a client thus comes to the determination that the language you've been using to describe your licensing is the equivalent