This article is adapted from the new book, Licensing Photography, by Richard Weisgrau and Victor S. Perlman, published by Allworth Press of New York (www.allworth.com).

At the advent of the digital age that we all now find ourselves immersed in there was a common belief that digital technology would call for a change in the way photography is licensed. Today we know that it caused little change in licensing practices and agreements except to distinguish between print and digital electronic uses in licensing agreements. The major difference that digital technology provided was in the tools we have at our disposal to make and to license our photographs. Computer hardware, software programs, imaging technology, the Internet and World Wide Web, the scanner, and the digital camera have developed to a point where they can contribute great benefit to the licensing process. Digital technology has brought new ways to capture and process photographs. During those actions you can add information to your digital images. Digital database technology now allows you to store and retrieve that information along with photographs. The ability to link a photograph with technical and copyright information is the most important innovation in licensing since licensing began.

Photography Processing Software
There are dozens of software programs that are touted as photographic processing and editing tools on the market today. But, if you are licensing your photography, many of those programs are inadequate for your needs. Whether you are working with scanned film or digital camera images, the software you use to process digital photographs should have the facility to add copyright data to the image file. Many programs allow you to include technical data, which is a good feature, but it has nothing to do with licensing. Whatever program you select, be sure it has the added facility to add IPTC data to the digital image.

IPTC is the acronym for International Press Telecommunications Council, a worldwide consortium of major news media companies. You can learn more about IPTC from its Web site (www.iptc.org). But you don’t need to know about IPTC to benefit from the use of its standards. Major software manufacturers have incorporated IPTC data fields into their software. For example, Adobe has created a metadata framework called Extensible Metadata Platform—XMP. It is available in Photoshop and other Adobe products. XMP reads data recorded at the time of shooting of digital images. That data is attached to the digital image and stays attached unless you decide to remove it.

Photoshop also provides synchronization between IPTC and XMP data. The combined data elements offer a complete range of information about each image. Since Photoshop has become a standard professional imaging tool many other professional-level software manufacturers are incorporating the IPTC and XMP data features for either compatibility or competitive reasons. You want to be sure that any imaging software you use incorporates IPTC and XMP tables.

XMP and IPTC Data Tables
The following list describes the categories of information that can be attached to a digital image in a program like Photoshop with XMP. These are only categories. In each category there are numerous fields of information that you can select or deselect.

• File Properties—Description of characteristics of the file, including the size, creation, and modification dates.
• IPTC—The only editable category allowing the addition of a caption for your files, as well as copyright information.
• Camera Data (EXIF)—Information including the camera settings that were used when the image was taken as assigned by the camera.
• GPS—Displays navigational information from Global Positioning System-enabled cameras.
• Camera Raw—Displays camera raw file format data.
• Edit History—A log of changes made to images

Why IPTC?
IPTC data is the only editable data that you can change at will, and it offers fourteen record fields for your information including copyright, credit, keywords, caption, location, and others.

The Caption field in an IPTC table offers the most space for recording data. With 2,000 characters, you can include a brief caption for the image and detailed license to use the image. The Caption field might contain information like this: Sunrise over New York City from the West bank of the Hudson River. Use of this image is licensed only to XYZ Magazine and only for use in its May (year) issue on the magazine’s cover. All other rights are reserved. Please see the accompanying invoice (insert invoice number) for complete licensing terms and conditions. Do not reproduce this image in any manner unless you are familiar with the complete license.

By using the IPTC tables you can attach information about your license to the photograph. This is no substitute for a separate written license. It is an adjunct to a written license. It lets anyone, other than your client, who might acquire a copy of the digital image know that they have no right to use it. Since most image users are using Photoshop or similar software to process images for publication, your licensing message will appear in the XMP/IPTC file display when your image is on screen. That won’t guarantee that they will look at it, but it will guarantee that you have made every effort to alert anyone who has a copy of the image as to the nature of the rights licensed and to whom. That can be a formidable weapon, if you ever have to take legal action because of an infringement.

Pricing and Licensing Software
There are a few companies that specialize in the photographic pricing and licensing software. Some of these programs are geared to stock photography only and others are geared to handle both assignment and stock photography. One advantage of these programs is that you don’t have to do much thinking when working with them, but that is also their disadvantage. The approach they take to licensing is based upon the experience of the few people who advise the producers. Maybe those advisors are doing things right and maybe they are not when it comes to licensing terms and conditions. Personally, we believe that you are better off constructing your own very specific license language than using the one size fits all language of mass-produced programs.

You have to ask what the price points for any specific usage are based upon. Is it the experience of the developer? Is it a survey of photographers, and how valid was that survey statistically? Our experience has been that pricing software usually provides fees that are higher than the norm of the trade. That can make them good indicators of starting points for a negotiation, but they are not necessarily going to be accepted by your prospective clients.

If you use such programs be sure to understand how the developer acquired the pricing information, and treat the information accordingly. You ought to compare the prices these programs recommend with other sources of pricing information, like the prices offered on Internet-based stock agencies.

Internet-Based Information
The Internet abounds with valuable information for the licensor of stock and assignment images. Photographers’ forums, bulletin boards, and list-serves offer the opportunity to exchange information with other professionals. You can learn about prospective clients’ business habits, exchange price information, access photography fee calculators, and even find how much the cost of living is escalating so you can adjust your pricing accordingly.

When accessing advice on the Internet you must take pains to be sure that the advice is sound. No one is editing most Internet-based information. Unlike the book publication business where the publisher normally evaluates the expertise of the writer before publishing that writer’s work, on the Internet it is possible and not uncommon that the advice you are getting is from a person totally unqualified to give it. Always check the credentials of your sources. You can search them on the Internet to see what they do in the real world.

Stock Agencies Online
Many stock agencies operate on the Internet. The larger ones have image search and pricing information online. Two of them, Corbis and Getty Images, are the largest agencies in the world. You can search through thousands of images in their archives. More important, you can price images for many different uses at their sites. Unlike pricing recommendations contained in pricing and licensing software, the online prices are the actual price lists of the companies that display them, that is, they are real prices. As such, these price lists can be more reliable guides than other sources of pricing information. To access these price lists you will have to register with the site. It is an easy process that immediately allows you to see pricing information. Once you register, you don’t have to do it again when accessing the site in the future.

Another value to stock agency Web sites is the access to the parameters of use that are used to determine the price. These parameters vary from application to application, but within any application the parameters help define the scope of the license. For example, for use on the World Wide Web as part of a corporate promotional Web site, the system will ask you to specify whether the placement of the image is a home page or secondary page. It will also ask for duration of use like one month, three months, etc. It will ask questions about the territory and language of use. Then it will return a price based on those criteria. Those criteria then become part of the license to use the image. A good stock agency Web site is a good place to take a lesson in licensing and pricing.

Photography Business Software
There are several companies that sell computer programs designed for the assignment and stock photographer. Some of these programs are modular so you can download nothing but the part of the program that you need, that is, if you only shoot and sell stock, you can just get that part, and likewise for assignments. Programs of this sort are known as vertical software because they are designed for a narrow niche market.

Vertical software can be very expensive for two reasons. One is that there is a small market so the costs of programming, revising, and supporting the software has to be spread out over a small customer base. Another reason is because they, unlike regular office software,are customized for the photography business. Customization always costs more.

There are three things you must be particularly aware of if you intend to purchase vertical software. First, be sure you can modify the terms and conditions of licensing agreement forms built into the system. You may want to modify them from license to license. Second, make sure that you can customize licensing language or write in your own. You don’t want the programmer to describe your licenses. Third, and very important, be sure that the data you put into and store in the program can be exported out of the program and imported into another program in a form that any database can read. You never want to be in a situation where the software provider goes out of business, then your program becomes obsolete, and you cannot use the data you have accumulated over years in a different program. Vertical markets are often fickle. They can reach sales saturation quickly. If that happens, it is possible that the company will have cash flow problems. Cash flow problems are the cause of most business failures.

Office Software Suites
A number of software companies offer suites of software suitable for the business office. These packages usually include word processing, spreadsheet, drawing, calendar, and contact components. The various components can be integrated to allow the user to add graphics, spreadsheets, and databases in text documents. They also allow the user to mail merge names into letters. In effect they are just like the vertical software that is marketed to photographers for office business management, but they do not have the industry-specific formatting and templates of the vertical software applications.

If you are running a small photography business, you might not need a high-powered software application designed specifically for photographers. For example, if you are doing four assignments per month and ten stock licenses, do you need custom software? Only you can answer that.

Tracking Licenses and Uses
There is not much reason to license your photography if you are not going to enforce the licenses. Fortunately, most licensees are faithful to the terms of a license. Some are not because they either forget or ignore the terms. Because of the latter group some police work is in order. You ought to check to see if images are still being used after the license to use them expires. For example, if you license a photograph to a Web site for one year, you ought to visit that Web site after the end of that period to see whether the image is still in use. Generally, print uses end with the distribution of a press run, but not always. Advertising uses end with the end of a campaign. Magazines and catalogs are dated. Sometimes brochures and similar materials are reprinted. Sometimes photographs used in one year’s annual report are reused in the next year’s report.

Getting your name on a client’s mail list, subscribing to its publications, watching the trade press, and visiting Web sites are all ways you can police licenses. Most photographers develop an instinct for determining which clients need to be monitored. There are ample opportunities for licensees to make mistakes. You can help them to avoid them.

One way to reduce the amount of monitoring you need to do is to notify a licensee when its license is about to expire. To do that you have to track expiration dates. An easy way to do that is to set up a separate calendar in your office software. You enter the permission number in the calendar on the date that the license is set to expire. Each month you check the next month for expiration dates. Then you send a notice alerting the licensee to the approaching expiration date, and inviting them to obtain a new license, if they wish to use the photograph beyond the expiration date. If you used a license with a copy of the licensed photograph(s), the licensee will have no trouble either identifying the image(s) or understanding the limits of the license. You can send the notification by e-mail with the license as an attachment. If you have created the license in MS Word, almost any business will be able to open it. You can also convert word processing documents to Adobe PDF files to attach to e-mail. Anyone can get a free copy of Adobe PDF Reader, and just about everyone who uses the Internet has done so.

A simple way to create a notification form is to modify the permission form that you use to make it a reminder. It is so simple to do in a word processor that there is no excuse for not doing it. By notifying the licensee that its license is about to expire you guarantee to the fullest extent possible that any use beyond the license date will be provable as “willful.” And willful infringements are eligible for the maximum statutory damages under the law, which, at the time of this writing, is $150,000 per infringement. Good licensing combined with copyright registration provides photographers with the most effective enforcement tools available.

Digital technology provides the photographer advantages from the moment an image is captured to well after it is published. The feared liabilities of the digital age have become assets. ca

Licensing Photography may be ordered for $19.95 plus $5 shipping and handling from Allworth Press (www.allworth.com), 10 East 23rd Street, New York, NY 10010 or by calling toll-free (800) 491-2808. New York State residents should add sales tax.

_{© 2006 Richard Weisgrau and Victor S. Perlman}