Understanding Royalty-Free Stock Photos
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In Web Design and Print Design, we always use images on our designs and most new designers get their images from other sites found in a image search. They might not know about it but copying images from other sites is stealing and violates copyright laws, and some site owners are very serious about their copyright.
So what is Royalty Free? According to Wikipedia:
Royalty-free describes material (typically graphics such as stock photography and icons, but also sound such as music loop samples) that may be used for profit, without paying royalties. Royalty-free media is usually acquired for a ‘one time only’ fee, although public domain imagery and many works created under a copyleft license are also usable without paying royalties or an initial fee.
What is a Stock Photo? According to Wikipedia:
Stock photography consists of existing photographs that can be licensed for specific uses. Book publishers, specialty publishers, magazines, advertising agencies, filmmakers, web designers, graphic artists, interior decor firms, corporate creative groups, and other entities utilize stock photography to fulfill the needs of their creative assignments.
What is a Royalty-Free Stock Photo? Here is a basic overview:
- Pay a one-time fee to use the image multiple times for multiple purposes (with limits).
- No time limit on when you can use an image.
- No one can have exclusive rights of a Royalty-free image (the photographer can sell the image as many times as he wants).
- A Royalty-free image usually has a limit to how many times you can reproduce it. For example, a license might allow you to print 500,000 brochures with the purchased image. The amount of copies made is called the print run. Above that print run you are required to pay a fee per brochure, usually 1 to 3 cents. Magazines with a large print run cannot use a standard Royalty-free license and therefore they either purchase images with a Rights-managed license or have in-house photographers.
Buying Royalty-Free Stock Photos are very cheap (lowest price costs a dollar) and you will have no problems from copyright infringement, as long as you follow your image rights. I recommend you get stock photos here. They have over a million cheap stock photos with a minimum of 1686 x 1127 pixels, only for a dollar each.
Do the right thing and buy a stock photo instead of stealing from other sites. It only costs a dollar, you know. :-)
Check my other posts:
- Say Yes to No!Spec - No to Speculative Work
- How to display Javascript on top of Flash
- Photoshop TV
- Understanding Copyright
- SEO for Web Designers