Blog Series "Proper Picture Credits": Part 1 - Picture rights management within your company

In Germany, with its thriving "warning industry", warnings or recourse claims due to incorrect picture credits are unfortunately still a part of everyday life. And it's not just naive private bloggers who have liberally used Google Image Search to illustrate their pages who are affected. Even with the picture rights management on corporate websites, there are often errors and inaccuracies that make it possible to issue a warning. Therefore, correct picture credits in the CMS are a topic that all online project managers must address. Especially at a time when there are more and more picture plagiarism search services that scan the web for copyright infringements.

But how are companies that don't have a dedicated image rights clearance department or use a highly specialized media asset management system supposed to ensure that all images on the company website have been properly accounted for? In our series of articles, we show a few of the typical sources of error and how to counteract them with simple means, proper documentation or the help of our image rights extension

Clarification of rights and licenses for existing image material

When preparing a web presence, it is common to fall back on company and product photos from archive inventories. Often, the photos originate from older brochures and catalogs. Before publication on the website, however, it should be clarified with the actual author whether the rights of use to the photos also apply to publication of the photos on the internet.

The ideal way to create an authentic corporate image is to design the website entirely with the company's own photos. When placing the order, the rights for online publication and use in social media services can also be clarified in the contract with the photographer. But be careful if the photos also show the staff: In this case, declarations of consent must also be obtained from the employees and documented, as there is a right to one's own image. Photos from the company kindergarten, for example, are particularly critical. A good photographer will of course manage to create representative images here as well, which do not show any children individually recognizable.

Without your own images, you often have to resort to stock photos. There are some stumbling blocks here, too. The major stock photo agencies and free services offer licenses for different types of use. Some image content, for example, may only be used for editorial contributions, not for commercial purposes. Under certain circumstances, further processing of the motifs is prohibited. Or specific information is required in the image credits. In case of doubt - even on large image portals - the license agreement for the selected individual image always applies. If possible, the license terms should be securely archived by the company itself together with the original version of the image.

The use of stock photos in social media channels such as on Facebook are often not covered by the standard licenses for online use.

If the commissioned web agency acquires the stock photos, care must be taken to ensure that the license documentation is handed over accurately at the end of the project. This is because if there are problems with copyrights later on, the site owner is responsible in the first instance, not the agency carrying out the work. Any resulting claims against the executing agency should be specified in the agency contract.
Image rights can only be transferred via sublicensing by the agency in special cases. Ideally, the agency already licenses the image rights to an account that can be shared with the customer.

Caution: even inconspicuous icon sets used on the company website may require their own copyright notice.

Because of the low cost and large selection of free images, free image databases such as pixabay or unsplash are becoming increasingly popular. There are also more and more images with Creative Commons licenses that can be found via Flickr or Wikimedia. In principle, there is nothing wrong with using images from these sources, as long as you adhere exactly to the respective license terms and image credit instructions.

However, it must be clear that there is always a certain risk of warnings. There is no guarantee that the images have always been uploaded to these services with the correct copyright and licensing information. The image editor must therefore always live with a certain legal risk that a warning may still be issued. Therefore, it is particularly important to document the licenses and copyrights valid at the time the image was downloaded. In this way, it is then possible to reject claims made later by a photographer who had subsequently deleted his image from the free databases.

In the next part of the series, we will describe how the image rights established and documented in the company must then be correctly identified on the web server.