Selling Photos as Digital Downloads for Non-Commercial Use

One of the cool features we released a few weeks ago with the Personal Archive is the ability to sell an image as an electronic personal use license via digital download. Why is this so cool?

From a technical standpoint it’s not. The mechanism allows you to sell (i.e. license) a digital download of an image whereby the pricing is based on the size of the download. Sounds a bit like Royalty-Free right?

That’s where the similarity ends.

Royalty-Free is designed as a commercial license, so the buyer can basically do whatever they want with the image. Clearly, most of us don’t want that happening.  If you shoot a wedding, and then offer the image under a royalty-free license, an unscrupulous buyer could appropriate the image for commercial purposes. Imagine the bride on a subway sign for a divorce lawyer. That wouldn’t do wonders for your wedding business.

On the other hand, if you’re only offering it up for personal use, the image is protected by the legal license that you offer to the buyer. And if an infringement occurs, you have a basis for suing. It also means you have a way to sell downloads at a different price point than the typical royalty-free image.

Here’s an example of the purchasing screen from Jason Kindig’s PA homepage.

Everyone talks about the death of print, and while we’re not about to concede that prints are dead, we definitely see an uptick in the use of digital imagery for personal purposes like on Facebook, desktop wallpapers, etc. The Electronic Personal Use license is a perfect way to offer a downloadable file to your clients through our simple-to-use cart interface.

So whether you shoot weddings, headshots, sports, etc, there’s probably a good reason to consider adding the personal use license to your arsenal of products.