Nice one
September 24th, 2008
by Gwyn Headley
Managing Director
There’s a fascinating photo blog called Photopreneur, clearly about making money from photographs, and they’ve just run a really good article on fotoLibra.
It’s pretty accurate as well, apart from me saying we’d only rejected four images in the whole time since we started, but when I pointed this out to the writer, it was corrected the next time I looked. Pretty impressive.
How do we go about getting more articles like that? Journalists always say they want to write about something new, different and exciting, but when they get round to filing their articles it’s the same old diet of Google, Flickr and Facebook.
Any suggestions? Or are any journalismos reading this? I’m happy to talk!
Surely this statement from the article cannot be true:
“Images submitted to fotoLibra do not have to be exclusive but if an image is licensed on a rights-managed basis, it has to be removed from other outlets for the period of the license, an important consideration.”
Assuming it is not sold as an exclusive through Fotolibra why would it have to be removed from another outlet?
Gary.
What was written is correct, but it could have been expressed more clearly, so I’ll try and explain.
It’s the difference between ‘marketing’ and ‘licensing’. fotoLibra does not demand exclusivity when marketing images — you are free to market your pictures where you will — but when the sale of a rights managed (NOT a royalty free) image is made, a license is agreed between the vendor (fotoLibra) and the purchaser (the customer).
This license will usually, but not always, demand exclusivity in a particular field, so when the sale is made it will be a requirement that the image is not sold in the same sort of market for a specified period of time.
For example, we could sell one of your pictures for the front cover of a book to be sold in the UK and USA. The publishers would probably demand exclusive rights for that usage in those territories. So an exclusion would have to be placed on that image from all sales outlets.
It doesn’t stop us selling that exact same image to a greetings card manufacturer, or for a poster, or whatever. If the customer had purchased a ‘buyout’ — exclusive rights to use the image wherever they wanted — then we couldn’t sell it anywhere else.
But they would have paid a very large amount of money for those rights, and we’d all be extremely happy.
Does that make it any clearer?
Evening Gwyn
Thanks for the reply.
I understand all that and your explanation is clear but I’m afraid you are being too kind to the journalist.
His statement is clearly not correct.
Best wishes,
Gary.