• Have you ever seen your own photos, floor plans or descriptions used by another agent?

• Have you listed a property with a set of photos or a floor plan produced by someone else?

• Do you know who owns the photos, floor plans, property descriptions you use in your business?

Copyright law in the UK helps protect you and the content you create as well as those who work with & for you.

Below we’ll take you through a straightforward guide into copyright law specifically relating to estate agents (and their photographers!).

Copyright law is perceived by many as complicated and maybe even irrelevant given the apparent availability of digital content online but it’s actually very straightforward and exists to protect all content producers so that’s photographers like us as well as agents like you. Below we’ll explain in plain English the principles of copyright and how estate agents can avoid problems but also protect what you do.

Breaching Copyright may seem trivial but it has the very real potential to land you in hot water, cost you money and/or loss of reputation but can also be important in protecting you and your business. 

Copyright Background

Copyright is covered by the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988, you can see the legal text here and the following practical overview is specific to UK based agents.
Copyright is automatically assigned to a creator as soon as they create something, a photograph, video, floor plan and even a written description of a property for example. Copyright means that only the creator may recreate what they have produced. They have exclusive rights to do whatever they wish with their work but no-one else can use it without permission.
The creator of the work can choose to sell it, gift it or give it away, or more usually give someone, a third party, the limited rights to use the work for specific defined purposes. This is normally by way of a licence, to allow the third party to use the work and/or to reproduce it, for either personal or commercial purposes.

A licence will set out the specific permissions for using the work and how it can be reproduced/shared, it will generally limit the circumstances to specific audiences, limited numbers, media, geographic areas etc.
It is important to remember however that a licence is different to the copyright itself, generally the creator will retain the copyright (ownership & control) of the work but let others use it by licence.

A regular misconception is that the copyright owner is responsible for controlling other people’s use of their work and this is where my experiences with breach of copyright generally start. It is the responsibility of a user of content to ensure they have the appropriate rights or permission(s) to use someone else’s work and the presence or absence of a copyright notice or symbol (©) is irrelevant as this simply indicates copyright.

Copyright for Estate Agents

You should always confirm you have permission to use any content provided to you, the best way to do this is to ask who created it and ask them directly. This is most important if you’re taking on a property previously listed by another agent, the owner may believe they ‘own’ the photos, floor plan etc produced of their home but they’re probably incorrect. That content is likely to have been supplied “under licence” and not for re-use by others.

You should never simply ‘screen-grab’ images or content to re-use yourself, this is the fastest way to breaching copyright and most likely to result in problems.

As an Estate Agent who commissions a photographer like Through the Lens to photograph your listings or a surveyor to produce your floor plans, you will generally be granted a licence to use the photographs in your advertising (this should be covered in your photographer’s Ts&Cs).
You will not have any further rights to share the content with anyone else or use it for anything other than marketing the property without the copyright owners permission. So if the property is withdrawn from the market or (God forbid!) the vendor moves to another estate agent you cannot give the photographs or floor plan to the home owner or the new agent unless the creator has given you permission. Of course, faced with this issue the easiest thing to do is just ask the photographer or surveyor for advice.
Equally where you have created a written description of a property you are automatically assigned copyright and no-one else can reproduce or use that without your permission.

Generally Through the Lens Photography are happy for their estate agent clients to give a copy of the photos to the home owner (it seems a reasonable courtesy after all!) but for personal use only. I have experienced problems however where my photos have been used elsewhere (generally on social media) for purposes other than personal use, marketing a design business or collaborating with manufacturers for example. In these situations I will generally contact the person sharing my images and remind them of copyright, often a simple credit added to the social media post is sufficient but sometimes I will ask for the content to be removed.

Where a home owner changes estate agent and wants to continue to use my photos and/or floor plan I will initially check with the original estate agent that they’re happy for them to be re-used (this is out of courtesy to my client) and if so I will charge a small licence fee to cover their re-use by another agent.

Usually copyright is straight forward and works well, providing all parties understand their responsibilities. Problems and breaches of copyright are generally quickly resolved through a quick conversation but can escalate and become more serious.
Our advice would always be to check you have permission to use content first, speak to whoever crated the content (not who shared it) and if you have problems, either through sharing content or having your own content shared by others, talk to the other party first and as soon as possible.

Check out our frequently asked questions below for more detail:

Frequently Asked Questions

• I’ve just taken on a new listing and the vendor has provided me with a set of photos of their home, it’s their house so I can use the photos with their permission right?
  No, not necessarily. If the owner has taken the photos themselves that’s fine but if not you need the creator’s permission, they may have been provided to the owner for personal use only.

• The owner of a new listing paid a previous agent for marketing but they failed to sell the home so they’ve moved agent. As they’ve paid the previous agent for ‘marketing’ the photos are theirs so we can use them can’t we?
  Again no, probably not. You need to check with the creator of the photos as they were probably produced for the original agent’s use only, you may be able to use them by paying a small licence fee but check first.

• We’ve just listed a property and found a floor plan on-line in PDF format that can be downloaded and reproduced, as it’s been shared online we assume we can use it and save ourselves the time?
  No, a floor plan is just the same as any other content, you can’t reproduce it without the creator’s permission.

• Can we cut and paste the description of a property from a previous listing online?
  No, not without the creator’s permission, descriptions, blurb etc is content and subject to copyright just like any other.

• I’ve noticed another local agent has listed a house with the photographs we took, can I ask them to stop using them?
  Absolutely. As long as you haven’t given permission then the new agent is breaching your copyright and you should talk to them as soon as possible, you are within your rights to request they cease using them straightaway.

• We’ve been given some photos of the garden in summer by the owner of a new listing but they can’t remember who took them, can we use them?
  It’s your responsibility to determine ownership and copyright, if you choose to use content without permission you risk action further down the line, sometimes you have to assess the risk involved. My advice (as a photographer) would to have a policy of only using your own, or correctly purchased content, that’s always a much more professional approach.

Do you have any questions? Have I missed anything or do you need to know more? Leave me a comment below or drop me an email.