Recently I got to hear Joanne Dennison speak about intellectual property rights. She had some great insight into how to use creative and intellectual property correctly to avoid lawsuits and such. Many event professionals may be aware that using popular music at events and in presentations requires a license but many probably don’t do so. The same goes for photos and video.
As a photographer and owner of a photography agency we deal with these issues on a regular basis and one of the things we’ve seen emerging over the last several years is the trend toward our clients hiring us to do custom stock photo libraries. A custom stock library is basically created through a shoot where we use either hired talent or actual employees of a firm on location and shoot the type of images they may want to use for their presentations, etc. This can include ‘business’ type shots of people in a meeting, shots of their facilities and/or products or services in action, as well as video clips of them in action. All of these are then usable by the company with no fear of additional licensing fees or lawsuits, and more importantly, no one else, especially a competitor, will have the same images in the marketing pieces (which can cause clients a lot of confusion and has happened more than you might think).
Many people are worried that buying stock photos can be expensive but if you set aside a budget to create your own custom stock library all the uses of the images are included and you know it will be relevant to your brand.
