Photography Studios Editing and Proofreading Services

Two years after a shoot, a client uses the images in a national campaign. The photographer's invoice said "full day photography, images supplied". Whether that sentence handed over a licence for one brochure or every use in perpetuity is now a question for somebody else to answer, and the answer will depend on a document nobody wrote.

We edit what photography studios and commercial photographers produce — licence terms and usage grants, quotations and estimates for commissioned work, model and property releases, terms of business and cancellation policies, shoot briefs and call sheets, print and album agreements for portrait and wedding work, stock and syndication terms, and correspondence about unauthorised use. Our editors work on the documents that say what a client bought.

The licence grant is what a commercial photographer actually sells, and its failure is a deliverable described instead of a permission. Files are copies; the licence is the product. We work through these so the grant states the media, the territory, the duration and the extent of use, since these four together are the licence and omitting any one of them makes the other three unenforceable in practice; so exclusivity is stated separately from the grant, because a client assuming exclusivity and a photographer assuming otherwise both proceed happily for years; so what is not granted is listed, given that resale, sublicensing to a client's own customers, and use by a parent or sister company are the three that recur; so the credit and attribution requirement is written with where it must appear and what happens if it does not; so the renewal or extension terms are given with an indication of cost, as a client who has to negotiate blind will simply use the images anyway; so the position on retouching, cropping and derivative work is stated; so releases are described with what they cover — model, property, minors — and any use the release does not permit, since sensitive or political use is usually outside what a subject agreed to; and so the invoice repeats the licence rather than describing a day's work. Terms written this way get paid for the second use.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including terms, client information and unpublished work. We are editors rather than lawyers or licensing specialists, and we offer no legal advice and no view on copyright, licensing or any claim. What we can do is make the licence say what the client bought.