Revised: 2007-07-12

Moral rights

The important moral rights are the right to object if your work is distorted - to defend its "integrity" - and the right to an accurate credit. These are obviously important to protecting and spreading your reputation - and without your reputation you have no work.

The Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (see link below) made moral rights explicit for the first time in UK law. The exact rights are:

• the right to be identified as the author of the work;
• the right to object to false attribution of the work; and
• the right to object to "derogatory treatment" of the work - also referred to as the right to protect the integrity of the work.

In plain English, photographers have the rights to a credit, to prevent anyone else claiming authorship, and to protect the authenticity of their photographs. This last is particularly important now that computer technology makes digital manipulation so easy and so hard to detect.

But there are (of course) exceptions to the above.

• In particular the moral rights to a credit and to object to derogatory treatment do not apply to any work made for the purpose of reporting current events, or for newspapers, magazines and similar periodicals, or appearing in encyclopaedias, dictionaries or yearbooks.
• The right to a credit is effective only if it is "asserted": the phrase "Moral rights asserted" or even "All rights reserved" on photo identification stickers and their digital equivalents and on invoices seems to be sufficient "assertion".
• Employed photographers have no right to a credit on photos taken in the course of their employment, and they have no right to defend the integrity of any picture (except in the case that the picture is not reporting news or current affairs, does not appear in a newspaper or magazine, and has appeared with a credit).
• UK law makes it possible for these rights to be given up or "waived" anyway.

Clients using laundry-list contracts often demand that photographers "waive" their moral rights, even where the law already rules them out for the uses that the photographer is licensing. Such pressure needs to be resisted. The point of it, in so far as there is one beyond grabbing everything the lawyer can think of and most things they can not, is to create the impression that waiving moral rights is normal business practice.

Of course in the case of photographs, publishing a picture that has been altered in any way beyond correcting colour balance, reasonable cropping and so forth is wrong - unless it is clearly labelled as manipulated and therefore an illustration, not reportage. See the NUJ Code of Conduct (linked below).

And another thing...

Photographers who do studio or wedding work as well as the kinds covered in this Guide need to know about the "fourth moral right". This forbids them publishing, broadcasting or exhibiting photos taken for "private domestic" clients (without the client's permission). It also appears to mean that it is illegal for newspapers to publish a "pick-up" photo - for example a studio photographer's family portrait - unless you have the explicit permission of the person who "commissioned" it as well as the holder of the copyright, and as well as permission to borrow the physical photo.

But remember, you own copyright

Some photographers are confused by our complaints about the exclusion of moral rights in work done for newspapers and magazines. Remember: you own copyright - the economic rights - in every picture you take as a freelance, until and unless you assign it to someone else.

Generally useful links: