Home › Forums › Photography Q&A › How do I protect my photos on my Pixieset website? › Reply To: How do I protect my photos on my Pixieset website?
Sorry about the delay… I really have no personal experience with custom photo licenses or agreements.
My research and experience has actually been leading me away from limited “all rights reserved” licenses to “open” licenses, such as a public domain or Creative Commons license. I’m sure this is not going to be a popular position on a photography forum, but I’ve been slowly coming to the conclusion that trying to “lock up” my photos is not helping ANYONE. I’m not making any money on my photos anyway, so it doesn’t help me. And if anyone else wants to use one of my photos I wouldn’t charge them money anyway… so why not just give them permission to use it by default by releasing them with an open license? I’ve changed most of my photos on Flickr to a CC0 license which allows anyone to use them for basically anything without needing to worry about permissions or payments.
My thinking on this (from a Christian perspective) has been influenced by Andrew Case, Tim Jore, and Conley Owens. The other major influence has been actually facing the maddening difficulties with navigating copyright/licensing issues for so simple a thing as a photo illustration in a book. (Hint: if you plan to publish a book, you’ll save yourself a LOT of trouble and stress by just taking the photos yourself or just cutting out the photos. Trying to track down copyright holders and then actually receiving permission to publish their image is basically a hopeless job.)
Photos are a relatively minor thing; where things get a lot more serious is when Bibles and other biblical materials are locked away and permission is refused for those who would like to use them for the Kingdom of God. Andrew Case has a whole series of podcasts on this issue, and a great resource for learning more is the website https://copy.church/.
Sorry, you might be able to tell that this is a subject that gets me kinda worked up. 🙂 I don’t mean to cast aspersions on anyone else, I’m just sharing some of my thoughts that have evolved over the past few years.