Photo rights on Movie Reviews

  • Unknown's avatar
    jennyketcham · Member ·

    I had wanted to review some films, something I’ve always wanted to do, and of course would love to add some photos of the film. Am I right to assume that publicity pictures released for advertising purposes are fair game to post on your site, or do you have to get permission from the film’s producers?

    The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

  • Unknown's avatar
    raincoaster · Member ·

    Advertising is different from PR. If the pictures have been released TO YOU, then they’re fair game. Sometimes PRs get stroppy about who can use which pictures, but almost never when it comes to not-for-profit blogs.

    If you want to be completely safe, use Picapp. Those have already been cleared for use. But I generally find that movies are extremely happy to get blog coverage and won’t interfere unless you’re posting pix from a shoot that’s still going on. They don’t want spoilers!

  • Unknown's avatar
    jennyketcham · Member ·

    Thanks, raincoaster! That’s a help. I’ll check it out.

  • Unknown's avatar
    joynmsu · Member ·

    Hi Jenny, thank your for being concerned about the permissions issues surrounding movie images/stills/PR photos. It’s hard to say, broadly, what the correct answer is since it really depends on who the photo belongs to/what web site you found it on. Also, it’s great that you want to add images to your site — that always helps enliven a blog post.

    I’d say it’s probably OK to use images released by the movie company on their press/PR site, but again, hard to generalize.

    Here is more information on how to use PicApp. Often they run photos of actors/actresses who attend movie premieres.

    http://en.support.wordpress.com/images/picapp/

    As an example, I found quite a few images related to Avatar:

    http://www.picapp.com/Search.aspx?term=avatar

  • tellyworth · Staff ·

    Just to add something to Joy’s answer:

    It’s not unheard of for a PR department to give permission for pictures or a trailer to be published on blogs, but forget to tell their lawyers. Then lawyers for the same company threaten to sue bloggers who publish them.

    This is why lawyers and PR people will be forced to spend eternity together in a very small room in hell, if there’s any justice.

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