Best Business Practices for Photographers [219]
PLUS has done an exceptional job of establishing this structure and noting terms that carry risks or are too general and may create confusion. Collateral is one of these. Dictionary.com defines collateral as:
Situated or running side by side…. Coinciding…or accompanying…. Serving to support…. Of a secondary nature; subordinate… Of, relating to….
The Formatting of a License
In Chapter 22, "Letters, Letters, Letters: Writing Like a Professional Can Solve Many Problems," we discuss the $70 million mistake over a misplaced comma. Interpretations of the U.S. Constitution's Second Amendment have sparked furious debate. How do you read the amendment?
"A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed."
The Supreme Court, in a case regarding the rights of a Washington D.C. man to keep and bear arms, decided in favor of the man, and not the government who sought to preclude him. However, for years (if we are to believe the Supreme Court has the final say), the Amendment was misinterpreted because of the commas.
Thus, the best way to format your license is not in paragraph form. A paragraph format requires a subjective interpretation by the reader.
Itemizing each of the primary elements of the license for your image is your best solution. This format should appear in several places: 1) on your contract (if it was an assignment); 2) on the delivery memo or accompanying paperwork that was sent with the images, whether in printed form or as a PDF; 3) on your invoice (whether assignment or stock); and 4) in the metadata of each image under the license (in both a natural language processing and a machine-readable format).
Before we go any further, let me explain the difference between the terms natural language processing and machine readable. Barcodes on products are the most familiar type of machine-readable identifiers. If, for example, you look on the back of this book, you will see a series of barcodes, and you know what the bookstore uses them for as it pertains to you— scanning the book to tell you how much it costs. However, after hours, for example, the bookstore may go through their entire inventory to check stock or look for books their inventory says exist but may have been stolen. Or the barcodes, when scanned by book category, could quickly provide guidance that a book has been misfiled and must be moved to another section. The entire management of this book you hold in your hands right now is done by that barcode. You, the reader, you have no clue what those fat and skinny lines say; you're only looking at the information such as "User Level: Beginner–Intermediate", "Category: Digital Photography," and the price. This book and countless other products carry both machine-readable and natural language–understandable information about the product.
In the instance of a visual image, the metadata contains a combination of natural language and machine-readable information. From category codes to camera serial numbers and captions, the format of metadata varies. For example, the date and time codes are determined in milliseconds since January 1, 1970, 00:00:00. Thus, the time 807926400000 is machine readable as Wednesday, 09 August 1995 00:00:00 GMT, for example. As another example, we have also been taught to interpret text within opening and closing quote marks as text that is a verbatim retelling of what someone said.
In the coming pages, I will build two examples and produce the natural language form and the machine-readable form.
We visit the PLUS website, and let's start out with a custom license for a client. We choose Select Custom Media, as shown in Figure 26.4.
Figure 26.4
PLUS License Generator webpage.
Next, we choose Start Basic for this example. We enter in our name, the name of the end user, and the licensor. In this case, I have entered John Doe at the XYZ Widget Company (see Figure