Usage considerations

A Visual Feast: What PR People Should Know About Multimedia Use

by Kara Udziela, Contributing Writer

The lasting truth in any communication medium is that examples, testimony, statistics and perhaps most important in today’s media-driven society, visual aids, breathe life into anything from your sales pitch to a marketing brochure or a speech. One of the tremendous benefits of the Internet and the rapid advances in technology that we have seen in the last 15 years, is the availability and access to fantastic imagery, sometimes free or at very low cost. These help populate and enrich our work and our client projects. In fact, imagery is so much in demand that if you go without it, you and your company or service might be seen as cheap and unsophisticated.

For the last several years I’ve run international PR programs for a great company called iStockphoto and, as a result, have learned many things about images and their use in communications materials that have helped me choose better images for my work and my clients. This knowledge has also kept me and my business safe from legal repercussions, while at the same time, ensuring the artist who created a beautiful or useful photo or illustration was fairly compensated.

Common misunderstandings

Thanks to search engines like Google Images, finding relevant and entertaining multimedia is extremely easy. But just because you can find, cut, copy and paste it doesn’t mean you have the legal (or ethical) right to use it without permission. All images are subject to copyright, whether or not the images are marked as such. And, contrary to popular misconception, the fact that just because someone decides to post an image online does not mean they have chosen to relinquish their copyright. Obviously, depending on the situation, you can use images snatched from the Internet without repercussion but it technically is still stealing and stealing is lame.

This leaves three other options: create your own, find images that artists have chosen to make available for use by the public or purchase stock. Each of these has particular pros and cons.

Create your own

Today, thanks to inexpensive digital SLR cameras and easy-to-use editing software virtually anyone can learn to create a photo that is technically good enough to be used for a variety of applications. Obviously, there’s a lot more to the art of photography than simply learning to use a camera properly. Sometimes, however, “snapshots” taken with the proper equipment are more than good enough for things like a blog or content for social media.

Creative Commons

Should you need something beyond your own abilities as a photographer, there are other no cost options. A growing number of artists do choose to make their work available to the public for private or commercial use. Creative Commons licenses provide simple, standardized alternatives to the traditional “all rights reserved” copyright. Through Creative Commons, an artist may choose variables relating to personal or commercial use and reproduction and whether or not develop and use derivative works.

For example, an artist may choose to make an image available for commercial or non-commercial use provided the image is not altered and he is given credit for the work. Or an artist may choose to make an image available to be tweaked, reworked and built upon provided the modified image is also made available under a Creative Commons license. One of the best ways to find Creative Commons work is to use the Creative Commons search engine at http://search.creativecommons.org.

By shooting your own or using properly licensed images shot by others, you can easily overcome the issue of copyright infringement. However, it is important to know that, beyond copyright, there are a number of other intellectual property and privacy issues that also must be considered – particularly if the image is going to be used for commercial purposes.

Usage considerations

For example, images that contain logos, trademarks, company names or even specific buildings, product designs or landmarks may not be used in commercial way. Also, if a recognizable person is in the image, that person needs to have given permission for their likeness to be used.

Date: 2015-12-18; view: 467