1. Pick a good name

Once you hit the ground running with business filings to the government and marketing yourself you don’t necessarily want to go back to the beginning. Start off with a good name to represent your business and your market. In a creative industry the use of a name connected to your legal personal name is a surefire way to brand yourself from others. Another aspect to consider is researching federal trademarks and local business names to ensure there is not a pre-existing business in play with that name. This does not mean you have to choose to use your legal name but can definitely help lend some credibility and name recognition in your market.

2. Get legit

Getting legit encompasses setting up business structure and securing the required permits to engage in business. Ignoring these structures demonstrates an unprofessional and immature business owner that can bring along many fines and penalties. Each jurisdiction varies on how to set up and maintain your business legally so be sure to check with local laws (Or hire an attorney to do it for you!)

3. Pay taxes

Taxes vary on location but at the core are federal income, state income and state sales taxes. Rates, schedules and methods of remitting vary depending upon jurisdiction.

4. Get insurance

While selecting a business structure that separates out liability for your personal assets, having insurance will help to cement professionalism while protecting yourself and clients. Insurance types include liability, equipment, disability, life, rental/owner property (such as for studios), and other miscellaneous insurances available through various providers.

5. Use lawyer drafted contracts

You’ve done all this work so far, why put yourself at risk? Contracts are way more than individual business policies. They include contract law principles that are specific to business transactions. Consider finding an attorney that is involved in the creative industry to ensure the business transaction contract you are using covers all areas you need and avoids a basic base-line contract. Search your local state bar websites or ask for referrals.

A word to the wise business person, don’t borrow from another. To ensure you know the legitimacy of the contract and the law behind it research and engage in a reputable attorney

6. Set up a website and/or blog

Time to get your web presence going since where is everyone these days? On their computer. Their phone. Their tablet. Your market is connected. Find a website and/or blog set up to display your work and market yourself to your target clients. Both will provide information to your clients and act as an online store-front for your business.

7. Set up social media

Going along with the website and blog presence your business NEEDS to be on social media. The various social media platforms out there provide a low-cost marketing tool with a high rate of return on investment of your time and costs. Miss the boat on social media and you’re missing the boat on gaining clients.

8. Define your policies and prices

Before even marketing to potential clients you need to have policies and prices in place. Going along with #9 (know your market) define this information to be able to provide potential clients a full view of your products, services, prices and policies up front. No surprises should be waiting for them. An informed client has a higher probability of a better customer service experience.

9. Know your market

All of this work is no good if you don’t define who your market is. Don’t just passively market. Get active by knowing who they are, where they are and what they want.

10. Know and control your business costs

Finally, but not last as there is way more to go along with building a business, for this top ten you should know and control your business costs. Having a pulse on what you have to spend and what you need to spend are important to ensuring you’re turning a profit. This is a good way to identify leaks and control the prices for your clients.

Photographers Need To Know (More)

This top ten isn’t all inclusive of everything you need to get your photography business going but it is a good start. In fact, it’s more than a start. Business owners should run through this check-list routinely to ensure they are up to date on all legalities, policies and business aspects to keep a smooth running business.

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For more legal help for photog’s snag The Law Tog’s free eBook “The Legal Lens” here.

Rachel Brenke is the lawyer/photographer owner of The Law Tog, a site is dedicated to providing legal, marketing and biz advice to photography businesses with maximum efficiency and results. Through business consulting services and her published book “The Laundry List: A Mother’s Guide to Balancing Family and Business” Rachel provides guidance in practical ways for photography business owners to succeed.

Please also join Rachel on Facebook!

http://www.pdnpulse.com/2009/07/homeland-security-secretary-report-suspicious-photographers.html

Here’s an idea. Instead of calling the cops on people with cameras we call the cops on politicians who speak before thinking.

Perhaps nowhere else in commercial photography is this more scrutinized than in food work (although fashion is gaining quickly.) Popular history abounds with stories of glue in cereal, marbles in soup and fake ice cream. Hard and fast legal rules are hard to come by. Most people can’t even tell you which division of the federal government is responsible for handling claims such as these (FTC.) And as far as I can tell, enforcement is near zero. Claims are only pursued when a complaint is made by a third party. But just because you won’t get caught cheating is no excuse for doing it.

Figuring out exactly what is allowed is very difficult and time consuming, after all, that’s why lawyers get paid so much. But a simple rule will keep you in the clear for the most part.

1. Shoot what you’re selling, no more, no less.

That’s it. If you’re selling a 4 ounce burger that comes spec’d with two slices of cheese, one slice of tomato, two leaves of lettuce that’s what you shoot. Not a 6 ounce burger, not a 3 ounce burger. Sure, you can make that 4 ounces look bigger and the cheese look extra melty, but don’t add or subtract ingredients. If you’re shooting an ice cream sundae because you’re selling an ice cream sundae, shoot the ice cream sundae. Yes it’s a pain and it’s probably best to try and shoot in the walk in but that’s how it is. Of course if you’re selling the chocolate sauce, or the nuts, or the dish, use all the fake ice cream you want.

Laws and regulations determine what we’re supposed to do. Whether or not we follow those rules determines our ethics. What we do in the absence of rules determines our morals. Photographers have a crappy reputation already, don’t add to it by cheating.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=101182453

I watch my webstats pretty regularly. A couple of years ago I noticed a big spike in visits to my site. This spike didn’t coordinate with any new marketing or PR campaign, so I though it was a bit odd. It continued for a few months and I started to dig. I found that some random person, who’s nickname was “strawberry,” had found one of my food (a bowl of strawberries) images and remotely linked it to her myspace page. It happens that strawberry was an, um, exotic dancer, so her myspace page got a lot of hits. I sent her a very nice email asking that she remove the image from her page, quoting appropriate legal language, and thanked her for thinking enough of my art to include it on her site. Two days later the image was no longer on her page.

All of which brings us to my first point. When you find an unauthorized use of your image, ask nicely for it to stop. Most people simply aren’t aware of copyright laws and how they work. Once someone comes along and educates them, they’ll usually do the right thing.

Had she not removed the image, I’d have gone to level two. Cease and Desist. I have a stock letter that basically says, hey, what you’re doing is illegal and if you don’t quit, it’s going to get expensive. My attorney sends that out on their letterhead. Nothing wakes people up like a letter from a law firm. (I have a nice trade deal with my law firm, I do headshots, they do cease and desist letters and other minor legal review.)

The cease and desist letter is very effective because it quotes the registration of copyright with the U.S. Library of Congress. If the image is old enough, it even quotes the registration number. This brings us to our third point…

Register your work.
Although you do not need to register your work to receive copyright protection, it does make things a whole lot easier if infringement occurs. For the most part, you’ll not be able to get your attorney to take the case unless the work was registered before the infringement occurred. The law says that if the work was not registered before infringement, you can only collect actual damages. In the case of the myspace page, what, maybe $100? If the work was registered prior to infringement you can collect actual damages, attorney’s fees and often statutory damages as well. Also, willful infringement is a criminal offense as well which means they can get into trouble with the FBI and the US attorney’s office.

The process of registering your work is relatively simple. Go to the copyright page of the US Library of Congress (www.copyright.gov) and fill out the appropriate forms. We use form VA and group register our work every 60 days. If you register your work within 90 day of first publication, it’s considered covered from the first date of publication. For copyright purposes, publication basically means putting the work out there for people to see. Maybe in a magazine, maybe on your blog, or even on a hidden proof page for the client. The copyright office is working on a system for digital submission of works but I’m not real happy with it right now, and using the paper form VA seems to work fine for me right now. John Harrington has an excellent walkthrough of the process on his blog here.

Technology is beginning to make it easier to find unauthorized use of photos online. The site tineye.com will search the web for images that appear to match your works and let you know if there are any copies out there in the ether. It’s still in beta, and they’ve only crawled a tiny percentage of the web, but it looks like it could be a great tool in tracking your work.

In conclusion…

1. Know your rights under the law and the Constitution regarding copyright.

2. Understand how your rights affect your relationship with your client.

3. Protect yourself, your work and your rights by using the tools provided.

Now that we’ve determined that artists are entitled to profit from their creations, we’ve got to answer the question of who actually holds the copyright, ie who owns the work. US copyright law was originally codified in 1790 but for practical purposes, the Copyright act of 1976 and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) are the laws that currently affect us.

Basically, the mantra of copyright is “He who creates it, owns it” (cut me some slack on the sexist slant, it was the 70’s after all.) If you’ve clicked the shutter, you can claim ownership and usually have a good case to make. The big exception to the rule is work for hire (sometimes referred to as work made for hire) and work made as an employee. Any works you create while engaged as an employee are considered to be the creations of the employer, not you. So if you work as an employee of a newspaper, all your shots taken while on the payroll belong to the paper, not you. Also, if you’ve agreed to a work for hire arrangement, the same holds true, regardless of your employment status.

When I work for a client it’s usually as an independent contractor, not an employee. It’s also very rare that I’ll sign a work for hire agreement. So usually I (or more accurately, my company, of which I’m an employee) is the copyright holder of the works that I create. I then license that work to my client based on discussions held before the job. Typically when I shoot for a magazine I grant them one time, non-exclusive, rights in the USA for a set press run, a a size not to exceed such and such a size, inside only, no reprint rights. If the want to run it on the cover, cool, it will be $x more. If they want to sell reprints to the subject of the story, cool, it will be $x more. If the want to run it online, if they want to make a poster out of it, if they want to put it on a cell phone, whatever. Any use outside of what’s spelled out in the license is reserved and must be licensed separately. Now this may seem to many like nickel and diming my clients, but the reality is that by parsing up the rights, reserving the rights that they won’t need and charging them only for what they do I’m able to do the job for the small budget that they have. Most publications understand this and are fine with it. Occasionally you come across those that don’t (or won’t) and you have to decide how to handle that.

That brings us to pricing. When I determine how much to charge for a job a lot of factors come into play. I think about how long with the job take to complete, what kind of production costs will their be, how cool will this job be (a shoot in Jamaica sounds really good right now) and I think about how the client will use the work. An image that runs in a small regional magazine might get seen by 50k people. That exact same image running in Time or other national magazine will be seek by 3 million or so. More eyeballs equals more money.

Writing a usage license can be tricky as it requires you (and your clients) to think about how the image will and will not be used. I like to use the PLUS system for writing licenses and go as far to include a link to their site when I send an estimate over. If you’re unfamiliar with PLUS (Picture Licensing Universal System) visit their site to learn more. The photography industry is notoriously arbitrary and there are a lot of unprofessional, unethical and just plain bad photographers out there. Using an industry standard on something like usage is a big help when it comes establishing credibility with clients (both in particular and in general.)

Many clients will request all rights, a buyout (neither term has any meaning, but they get thrown around a lot) or an outright copyright transfer. In many cases that’s warranted, although those cases are rare. In 14 years of doing this I’ve never transferred copyright to a client, although many have asked. I will regularly grant unlimited rights but still retain the copyright. If you transfer copyright to a client you lose complete control over that image. You can’t relicense it, you can’t make prints from it, you can’t even put it in your portfolio or on your website.