What Do You Mean I Don’t Own The Photo Copyrights…
I Paid For The Photos!!
Maybe you own the rights to the photos taken for your real estate listing or maybe you don’t!
According to Federal Copyright Laws, if you take the photos – then you own them and the copyright for them. But if you have someone take the photos for you, the law says ownership of the photos and the copyright belongs to the photographer.
Exceptions to the law are dependent on what type of agreement you have in place with the photographer. By law, if you have no agreement, ownership of photo copyrights automatically defaults to the photographer or possibly the photographer’s employer if there is one.
So, by law, the photographer owns the photos unless they transfer ownership to another party in writing.
So, Do You Actually Need An Agreement?
If you don’t care about ownership then technically you don’t need an agreement. BUT… best practice is to have a licensing agreement in place that spells out how the photos can be used, how long they can be used, where they can be used, and who can use them.
Typically, for real estate photos, a license gives the Listing Agent the right to use the photos for whatever marketing media necessary for the life of the listing that was photographed, but prohibits the Agent from selling or even giving the photos to any third party without written authorization from the photographer.
Any professional photographer, who knows what they are doing, will charge much higher fees in return for giving up ownership of a copyright. The reason being that they are giving up any possibility of using the images for personal marketing and any potential future income from licensing the images to other parties.
