Stock Photo Subscription: Billing Clients??

[spoffy]

I'm trying to convince my employer to join one of these stock photography subscription services (Getty Creative), and am wondering how to pass the cost of this on to my clients.

Because of the way the company is structured, they definitely want to keep the cost off of the overhead. So I'm proposing we charge them a nominal fee for each use of a photo (say, $20 each).

My question is: would this put me on thin legal/ethical ice with the stock company? Would that be considered reselling their photography? I say no, a coworker says yes. Appreciate any insights or alternatives.

[The Repro Kid]

I think the only way you could legally do this would be to use a mark-up system.

Meaning, you could purchase a CD, divide your cost of the CD by how many photos are on the CD to get a per piece cost, and then charge the per-piece cost of the photo plus a reasonable mark-up fee for obtaining the piece that you are reselling.

However, once you re-sold the image to your client you would have to delete the image from your hard drive and never use or resell that image again.

You would have to purchase the image again to legally resell it again.

Anything other than that would most definitely be illegal.

You need to read the terms and conditions of the stock photo CD, it may include a clause that prevents you from using the mark-up resale conditions that I outlined.

If you took the photo yourself, you could repeatadly re-sell the photo, this could be done by granting limited rights.

[AdobeAce]

Hi spoofy,

Most of these sites make it pretty clear that the purchaser is not allowed to resell the images to anyone. You can only use these images as part of a design that you're selling to a client.

But nothing says that you can't charge clients a search fee as part of your design costs.

Repro's methods sounds right as well and shouldn't be a problem. It's kind of like transferring the rights of usage.

Hope this helps!

Ace

[reet]

Hello all Who used stock photo sites to sell photos: about fotolia.com. When i wanted to delete my images and accouint, all links to delete photos were disabled ans i received message from theyr team:

02/16/2006 Hello. I am sorry to say that we are not able to delete your images per the contract your entered for our upload program. Please understand that we are growing and sales are increasing. I personally believe you will see a huge increase in the next month or so. Having your images online with us costs you nothing so please allow our marketing department to do their job and I am sure you will enjoy the fruits of their labors very soon.

So i have to do gifts for theM fotolia -liers

Nothing was approved during one week, but in the same time i cannot delete - so they need it?
They are definetely thieves.

[MacChick]

Whenever y'all have a need for stock images, you might take a peek at at iStockphoto.com (http://www.istockphoto.com/conversion/tgr). I've been using their images in my tutorials for a couple of years and it's a wonderfully affordable, super-high quality, royalty-free image resource (they do sell extended licenses for certain situations).

I'm a huge advocate of their philosophy and the community they've built, and have volunteered to be one of their evangelists. They also just merged with Getty :)