22-No "Items for Resale"

If you read the fine print of some royalty-free "Terms & Conditions" you'll find language that prohibits "items for resale". Often that includes such things as bookjackets, software packaging, tee-shirts and a lot of other mysterious things.

The hassle-related question becomes: How do you figure all this out?

Well, it becomes clearer when you understand what it is this restriction was intended to prevent:

It occurred to people selling clip photography that someone could purchase their material, "royalty free" and then repackage it and sell it all to someone else. An obvious example would be a greeting card company offering a "make your own greeting card package". They might buy royalty free images and then include them in their product for other people to use them in their products, and so on.

Or, a photographer could take royalty-free photos, incorporate them into their work-- and re-sell them as stock photos.

Or, theoretically, someone could just buy a bunch of royalty-free photos-- and re-sell them, as royalty-free photos to someone else.

Therefore, rather quickly, it became standard to say, okay, you may use these pictures in any way you want to promote or market a product-- but they may not be sold as the product itself (or part of the product). You can use them to promote, say, a line of tee-shirts-- but you can’t use them on the tee-shirt itself, because then it is part of the product that is being sold-- rather than being used to promote the product that is being sold.

Thus the restriction against use on a software package or a book. A royalty free image may be used to promote the item-- but if it appears on the packaging (or on the cover of the book) it has become part of the product itself-- and you can't use it that way unless you, well, do something else.

Like buy an "upgrade". Or negotiate a fee for the specific use. At which point the supposed "hassle-free" royalty-free transaction has just become virtually identical to a traditional rights-protected transaction-- of the type photo agencies have been perfecting for decades. (And they tend to be better at it than the royalty-free companies…)

It gets a little dicey, doesn’t it? And the wrong move can land you in court. So, if one of the appeals of royalty free is the "hassle-free" nature of the transaction, bear in mind that with an awful lot of uses it may be just a bit less hassle-free than advertised...