When a photo usage license expires, you expect the customer to stop using the image. This means that, for example, a photo licensed for one annual report can’t be reused in any other annual reports. Of course, already-printed copies of that one annual report can still be distributed.
But what about photos licensed for online use?
You can licence a photo for a specific time period online and then have it removed after the license has ended. This is common for photos used on a company’s home page and for pictures used for advertising.
But often a corporate or editorial customer will want to leave a photo online after the licence has expired rather than deleting the blog post, news story or Tweet that contained the photo.
To allow a customer to continue running (i.e. to archive) an already-published online image, you can grant perpetual archival rights to the photo in its original context (the surrounding content). This means the customer can’t repurpose or reuse the image but the photo can be left in its the original blog post, news article or Tweet in perpetuity.
One example is when a company publishes an online newsletter or online annual report. This company will often want to keep that publication online forever. They don’t want to have to remove your photo from that online publication after the license has expired.
Archival rights don’t have to be perpetual. You can set a term, perhaps five years, ten years, or whatever suits the situation.
Perpetual rights is not perpetual use
There’s a difference between archival use and continuous use.
If an image is published once in connection with a news story, blog post, magazine article, Tweet, newsletter, etc., its online presence can become an archival use. While the photo is always available to readers, its context doesn’t change and its value decreases with time like a back issue of a magazine.
But a photo used, for example, on a company’s home page or secondary page is a continuous use. Its context (the surrounding page content) may or may not change but this photo has continuous value that doesn’t decrease with time. Business portraits on an About Us page are a continuous use.
In every photo usage license, you have to specify the time period whether it’s short or perpetual. Remember that perpetual use is different from perpetual archival rights. The former means the customer can use and reuse the picture forever. The latter means the customer can keep the original use of the picture online forever. The former includes the latter but the latter doesn’t include the former.
