Non-Profit is not Non-Commercial

By the way, some people brought this up in yesterday’s post about the Austin Airport Not Support Artists. Not that the Ausitn Airport is a non-profit… but it did spawn a good opportunity to talk about this, since I think it will be helpful to people that are interested in licensing.

We do a lot of licensing… and I mean a lot… we handle dozens per week, and sometimes a lot more. It generates significant income from all sorts of licensees, so we have a lot experience in this area. Since all my work is Creative Commons Non-Commercial, many people think, “Oh, well that means non-profits can use it for free!” And this comes across in many emails.

However, we still charge non-profits full price. Non-profit does not mean non-commercial. Non-profits are still money-making organizations that can have significant revenue and significant expenses (often in the millions). Many non-profits want to use my imagery on websites, brochures, advertisements, and the like to generate revenue for the company. They then use these revenues to pay expenses like salaries, cars, food, air travel, and whatever other business needs. I consider buying image advertising rights to be on par with all the other expenses.

Daily Photo – Dead Tired in London

I really over-scheduled myself on this day.  It started out early and was 100% full of photography activity!  I don’t remember having a spare 5 minutes just to sit there and zone out…. I do try to plan a little zone-out time, but this day I didn’t.  I kind of build my day like I was playing an RTS game, making sure I never had any idle workers.

After I got off the tube at Marylebone station, I exited into this scene. This is the little area I crossed every day to get from the tube into my hotel. It looked so perfect in the rain that I just had to take a photo…even though I was dog-tired.