Copyrights & Licensing: When, Why, Who and How?

For commercial individuals please also reference this blog article here.

The Who?

The who is simple, licensing and copyright usages are specifically designed and to be used by commercial individuals/entities/companies and NOT non-commercial individuals such as wedding/senior/private parties/etc. clients. So when do you know you are using images for commercial purposes? Basically ask yourself, I'm I going to earn any revenue of any kind directly and indirectly from the images. If yes, then that is for commercial usage. Such as professional headshots will be sent to a talent agency where that talent agency uses it on paid/professional advertising and that advertises the model (you maybe) and other models within the agency plus the company as a whole earning the company more exposure. Hence why I generally do not work with agency models due to this plus they never want to pay for licensing (models and the agents).

Working with Commercial Photographers: Copyrights

*I'm not a legal professional nor this is legal advice*

A lot of photographers work very differently. Some commercial freelance photographers, especially the non-professional photographers, do not charge for licensing or copyright usage. And some, especially the professional photographers, charge for using their intellectual property (IP), aka copyrighted images, of their work. 

Each shutter (time when the button is hit on the camera) is a creation of a copyrighted image from the person whom owns that camera. In the U.S. there are basically 2 different types of copyrights, 1 that is registered with the copyright office and another that isn't. Both have very different protections, and obviously the one that is registered has a lot more protection of the cases there are any infringements.