Return to main Advice page

Legal Eagle

Copyright

Q: Pictures - who owns portfolio?

Recently I spent several hundred pounds on a portfolio of promotional photographs. However, I have been told that changes in the law mean I cannot reproduce the pictures because these are the photographer's property, not mine. Is this true?

A: It is true that the law changed under an Act of Parliament passed in 1988. Prior to that a person who commissioned and agreed to pay for a photograph automatically owned the copyright in it. Since the law changed, however, it is now the photographer who owns the copyright, unless he agrees to assign it to the customer.

Therefore, assuming your arrangements were made since the 1988 Act came into force, the photographer will own the copyright in your photographs, which cannot be reproduced without his consent unless, of course, he has assigned the copyright to you.

If he is a reputable photographer, who knew the purpose for which you required the photographs when you commissioned them, he might not wish to take advantage of your ignorance of the law and might be willing to assign copyright in the photographs to you without further charge. Alternatively, you could offer to pay him for such an assignment. It can be in very simple form. It will even be enough if he writes on the back of each photograph, "I hereby assign the copyright in this photograph to..." and signs and dates it.

Interestingly, you might also like to know that the same Act of Parliament also provided that a person commissioning the taking of a photograph "for private and domestic purposes" has a right not to have copies of the work issued to the public or shown in public by the photographer.

Accordingly, since copyright in your photographs can hardly be of any use to the photographer, in view of this restriction, he will not be giving up anything of value to him by assigning the copyright to you, and may for his reason be willing to do so without charge.

He may, however, want to attach a condition to the assignment, to the effect that the photographs are only used for your private portfolio to further your career. If, for example, he thought you might be making money out of them, by putting them on public exhibition, then he might want to make an additional charge for allowing you to do this.

First published July 1994