BMP in the Road: Image is Everything

Image is everything, right? Well, only if you have the rights to use it! The internet has put millions of images at our fingertips that we can copy to our desktops at will, but that doesn’t mean they’re ours.

I once worked for a man who LOVED retro imagery and would clip shots out of old magazines for us to scan in and place in designs. His thought was that if the client liked the concept, THEN we’d hunt down the rights to the work. Thankfully our clients never went in these directions, because as difficult (or impossible) as it would have been to find the source, it would have been ethically and legally our responsibility to do so.

There was a time when we scanned in a road-map as a background image. It was tilted back in perspective and the image was adjusted a bit further by adding pins and flags through an image editing program. Any map would have done the job and there was nothing special about the one we used – to us. But after the piece was printed, the map people noticed it and requested a fee, which we were obliged to pay. The point is that even a simple, non-critical background image that has been changed is still someone else’s image, and you need permission to use it.

Some images are called “rights restricted”, which means you pay to use them a certain way and may need to pay again to use them another way. For example, the perfect image you purchased for your postcard might not be able to be used on your website without additional fees.

Vice versa is true too. You may have had another company design your corporate web-site, but that doesn’t mean that you have the right to use those images whenever and however you’d like. It’s important that you know for certain how the images can be used.

Last time, we learned about getting images in the proper resolution. Now that we know that the image we’re using is both of good quality and OURS to use, what do we do if it’s not quite right? That’s for next time! – j