Home Wikituition Browse all terms Categories
Random term
Files, Metadata & Workflow

Image Licensing

Granting specified rights to use an image while retaining ownership of the copyright.

In depth

A licence defines media, territory, duration and exclusivity, and its price follows from those four dimensions rather than from the effort of taking the picture. Rights-managed licences specify each use precisely; royalty-free ones grant broad use for a single fee. Confusing royalty-free with copyright-free is the most common misunderstanding in the field.

Examples in practice

A one-year, UK-only, web-use licence is priced quite differently from an unlimited worldwide buyout of the same image.