Who owns the story you just told?

11 Sept

A grant-maker told me earlier this year that they have folders and folders of photographs, sent in by the organisations they fund.

He was talking about how usable they were. Most of them weren't. But as far as I could tell, not one of those photographs belonged to them.

Not the ones a project worker took on her phone, or the ones a volunteer shot at an open day. Not even the ones a freelance photographer was paid to take, unless somebody signed something nobody remembers signing.

A room full of material a funder cannot lawfully use, kept by people who believed they could.

What you actually bought

Paying somebody to take a photograph does not make it yours.

"The person who creates an image ('the creator') will generally be the first owner of the copyright."

And when you commission somebody, the IPO says the first owner is "the person or organisation that created the work and not you the commissioner, unless you otherwise agree it in writing."

The law itself leaves no wriggle room on how that changes hands:

"An assignment of copyright is not effective unless it is in writing signed by or on behalf of the assignor."

A purchase order isn't that. Nor is an invoice. A friendly email saying these are yours to use might be a licence, which is worth having, but it isn't ownership.

So the honest answer for most charities is that you hold a licence you have never read, from a photographer you liked, on terms nobody wrote down.

Why so many people remember it differently

Because for thirty-odd years, they were right. Before the 1st of August 1989, if you commissioned and paid for a photograph, the copyright was yours. Then it changed, and the default flipped to the person holding the camera.

Anybody who learned this before 1989, or learned it from somebody who did, is carrying a rule that expired before a lot of your team were born.

The bit I left out last time

I wrote recently that you should hand the camera over. Let the person tell their own story, in their own words, on their own terms. I still mean it. But I left something out.

Hand somebody a camera and you hand them the copyright.

There's an exception, and it is narrower than people assume. Work made by an employee, in the course of their employment, belongs to the employer. That's it. A volunteer isn't an employee. Nor is a service user, a trustee, a member of a community group, or a young person on a project.

So the more genuinely participatory your storytelling becomes, the less of it your organisation owns. Keep doing it anyway. Just be honest about what you're asking for at the point you ask, instead of finding the gap two years later when a campaign needs it.

Consent and ownership are not the same thing

A signed consent form deals with whether a person is content to appear. That sits in data protection: a recognisable person in a photograph is their personal data, and consent is one of several lawful bases you might rely on.

Copyright is a different regime, in a different Act, with a different regulator. It deals with who owns the picture. A model release is not a copyright assignment, and a copyright assignment is not consent. You can hold one and not the other, and most organisations hold exactly one.

I know this one from both sides now. I got married last week, and somewhere there are photographs of it that I did not take, do not own, and have every say over.

Where I stand in this

I should be straight with you. I'm a photographer. I shoot social impact, documentary and event work, mostly for charities, and the rights I've just described are rights I hold and license myself.

So read this knowing I have an interest in it. Which means saying two things that cost me something.

The first is that most charities do not need to buy the copyright. My own contract is the worked example. When I photograph an assignment, the client gets an unlimited licence: they can use those images for whatever they need, wherever they need them, for as long as they like. What the agreement does not do is transfer the copyright, which stays with me.

I keep it so I can show the work. My portfolio is how I get hired, and that's the whole of it. Licensing those pictures to anybody else would need the client's agreement first, so holding the copyright is not a back door to selling on images of the people you serve.

The second is that a lot of what your organisation photographs does not need a professional at all. A staff member with a phone is often the right answer, and it has a quiet advantage: work made by an employee in the course of their job belongs to you automatically. The pictures you own most cleanly are usually the ones you never paid for.

This is a summary of published law and official guidance, not legal advice. If you have a specific problem, take proper advice on it.

Four questions, on one photograph

Don't audit your archive. You'll open the folder, feel the size of it, and close it again.

Take one image. The one on your homepage, or the one that carried your last big bid. Ask who made it, who is in it, who holds the rights, and who benefits when it gets used.

The first three have answers you can go and find. The fourth doesn't, and that's the point of it: if a photograph of somebody's worst week wins you a six-figure grant, what did they get? Ownership is settled by law. Fairness isn't.

If you can't answer the first question, you've just learned something useful about every other picture you hold.

Every Thursday I send one practical idea to charity CEOs, fundraisers and social impact leaders, with a framework, a template and an AI prompt you can use the same week. This edition's includes the six questions to ask before you commission anybody: www.impactstoryteller.org