Johnny Hernandez/Getty Images

We know that the legalities associated with licensing images can be scary. It’s not an easy subject for anyone to completely comprehend. To help make it just a little easier for everyone to understand, we’ve turned to the guidance of our internal copyright and intellectual property experts (aka lawyers).

Below you’ll find some copyright and licensing tips they so kindly put together in regular, non-legal language. With these key tips in mind, it should make using professional images for your business a little less intimidating.

Whenever you use an image, it’s important to be smart about it. A copyright exists the moment an image is created by the photographer, and images are subject to copyright laws. If you want to use an image that you did not create, securing permission or a license is necessary. Don’t equate the Internet as “Public Domain” – just because it’s out there, it does not mean that it’s free for anyone to use.

By law, as the end-user of the image, you are ultimately legally responsible for insuring that you have obtained the appropriate rights to use the imagery. Because of this, you need to do your homework if anyone is designing communications for you or for your company. Be sure they are licensing imagery appropriately. Ask for copies of license paperwork.

Also, be sure you are using content from a trusted source. It’s good to remember that there are a number of providers that offer a broad range of imagery at affordable prices – licensing an image is easy and it’s worth the peace of mind.

If you DO receive a letter from us, here are six tips, please feel free to share these with your friends and designers:

We do have a dedicated Twitter account that helps with these specific kinds of issues. If you have a question, please find us @gettycopyright and we will try to help.

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Photo: Erik Dreyer

As an interesting follow-up to the last post about the copyright issues surrounding the Pop Art show in London, is an article in the NY Times a couple of days ago about appropriated photography in fine art. Included are quotes from photographer Jim Krantz, whose work has been appropriated (with much success – the piece in question sold at auction a few years ago for upwards of $300,000) by the most famous ‘appropriationist’ of them all – Richard Prince. Mr. Krantz’s photography is currently on display at the Guggenheim Museum by way of Mr. Prince’s well-received 30-year retrospective exhibition there currently.

Mr. Prince’s canny insouciance is captured nicely in a quote from 1993, where he off-handedly compares his series of appropriated Marlboro Man imagery to bank robbery: “No one was looking. This was a famous campaign. If you’re going to steal something, you know, you go to the bank.”

Despite what one thinks of the means used, Prince’s selection of the Marlboro Man imagery is appropriate in more ways than one – for years the now legendary Prince has been carefully cultivating his own image as one of a cowboy or outlaw of the art world. What could be ‘cooler’ than a successful bank robber? Images of cowboys (from advertising no less), biker chicks, inane one-liner jokes painted on canvas, seedy pulp fiction book covers reproduced as large paintings, actual hot rod hoods as sculpture – it all glows with the “aren’t I a bad-ass”, James Dean-meets-King Midas aura that surely is the unspoken base appeal at work behind Prince’s success. It operates like a cultural pheromone, luring everyone from the bookish critics, curators and academics who have steeped themselves soggy with arcane theory and hope some of the cool will rub off, to the uber-rich and listless collectors of uber-priced art, for whom the promise of an injection of life-blood from the netherworldly cultures of the American hoi polloi is irresistible, to young art students (who in a former era may have gone to Hollywood), who find reassurance in the Prince story (for themselves and their parents as well, who initially balked at the art school price-tags) , sensing that it augurs well for their own future success – after all, looking cool is what they’ve done so well their whole life.

But these more sordid motives are rarely if ever mentioned, indeed perhaps taboo, though easily discernable beneath the kind of intricately coded veil of mystifying sophistry that seems to have become the sole function of art writing (or perhaps always has been?). To wit (from the Guggenheim’s introduction to the current show): “[Prince's] deceptively simple act in 1977 of rephotographing advertising images and presenting them as his own ushered in an entirely new, critical approach to art-making—one that questioned notions of originality and the privileged status of the unique aesthetic object”.

But I admit to being a bit incendiary here, perhaps betraying the influence of Prince, provocateur par excellence, on myself as well. I do feel Prince to be an important and influential American artist, but also wonder if that importance might not rest at least partially on what he has revealed about the inner workings of the art world in contemporary society (intentionally or unintentionally? yet more fodder for the art sophists) . Whether it’s his influence or not is arguable (certainly not his alone), but when perfect recreations of grunge and gutter-punk get-ups from barely a decade ago sell for thousands of dollars in high-end fashion boutiques, I wonder if we’re any the wiser for it.

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Insightful take on the Pop Art Portraits show up at London’s National Portrait Gallery by Notable Internet Personality Cory Doctorow on Guardian Unlimited online. It is interesting to think about the evolution of Intellectual Property, especially the activity in that arena of late and since the advent of the internet, against the backdrop of cultural production within that same period (coincidentally up to and including the work of Paul D. Miller – see previous post). The ironies in this instance are particularly sweet (or sour perhaps), as Cory points out. My hunch is that we’ve many more such ironies in store, even more absurd, before this issue blows over – if it ever does…

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Interesting discussion yesterday on KQED San Francisco’s Forum with Michael Krasny on “Photography and Its Future”.

Photo: FPG via Getty Images

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Louie Psihoyos, who is a prominent contributor to Getty Images’ image partner Science Faction, is suing Apple for ripping off his photo below for their Apple TV ad campaign.  That Louie’s original photo below probably brings to mind the Apple TV campaign without me even showing any actual campaign photos or clips means that he probably has a good case, but for a better illustration go here.  That Apple had previously been in negotiations for use of the photo but backed out is even more incriminating.

Maybe this shouldn’t be too surprising though, considering Apple has been quite busy building a long sordid history of this type of thing, compiled nicely here by engadget.

Here’s a funny follow-up to this story comparing the packaging from the Atari 2600 Packaging circa 1982 to the Apple TV site.  Oops – curiously the pics are gone from flickr, but you can see them here.

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Philip J Brittan

Interesting entry in jet-setting troubadour/intellectual Nick Currie’s (aka Momus) blog about the opening last year of a Japanese division of Pantone, New Jersey-based color coders who’ve become the ubiquitous industry standard in design and printing. Following just on the heels of the Japanese division launch, Pantone also unveiled a new global brand identity.
I just saw the line of Japanese Pantone cellphones last week which I thought was a cool new development in the ever-expanding Pantone Universe, but didn’t think too much of it until stumbling upon Nick’s blog entry, which contains amusingly brainy and acerbic ruminations on Japanese culture, proprietary culture/copyright, and marketing.

Momus (Nick Currie)

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