Whose ownership of wedding photographs, the bride and groom? Of the photographer? How many licences define the ownership and use of images on the web?
We will try to delve into the intricate world of copyright, obviously with wedding photography in particular in mind.
Copyright and other web licences
Copyright is the universally recognised part of law (although every country has its differences), which protects the author of a work of a creative nature, the work itself from plagiarism (the actual copyright), and the fruits derived from it; and is acquired automatically when a work is defined as an intellectual creation.
But in our hyper-connected and hyper-shared universe, along with the rights that protect the author of the image, there are also Creative Commons licences, which defend the ownership and use of images and their sharing. Internet users can therefore exploit and use these works under the conditions set by the authors and without asking their permission.
How copyright applies to wedding photographs
In the analogue era, photography consisted of two basic elements: the negative and the positive, and both were real, tangible objects. For the photographer, maintaining ownership of the negatives was essential because he essentially made money from the copies he printed from these negatives, which became his primary source of income.
With the advent of digital photography, the problem of the legal definition becomes more complex because we start talking about formats (RAW for negatives and JPG for printable images), and above all because the meaning on which the 'analogue' law is based is missing: the negative and positive are in fact virtual products, so we are moving in a decidedly ambiguous field between real and digital existence.
The RAW format in fact only exists in digital form and cannot be printed. But despite this, it exists, so it must be regulated.
In addition, the difficulty in deciding how to define the ownership of negatives in wedding services stems from the difficulty in unambiguously defining the wedding photo shoot, which has not just one soul but many (it is the story of an event, but is also composed of floral details, shots of the location and the landscapes surrounding it, and of course it is also a portrait service); above all, it must absolutely be understood as a collection of images and not by evaluating the individual images taken.
Copyright law in Italy
Under Italian law, after several rulings, the Supreme Court ruled that:
"unlike art. 88 of the Copyright Act for photographs in the context of a contract of employment and photographs of objects on commission, art. 98 of the Copyright Act does not grant the person portrayed an exclusive right to the photograph. The provision merely affirms the existence of a competing right to the photographer, consisting of the possibility for the person portrayed to use the photograph. However, the photographer would retain ownership of the negatives and, unless otherwise agreed, would not be required to hand them over."
Thus, ownership of the digital negatives rests with the photographer, who is not obliged to hand them over to the client (but is obliged to keep and preserve them carefully for at least 10 years), unless they have agreed otherwise before the service takes place.