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If you buy the rights for a brochure with a print run of 5,000 copies, but then print 50,000 copies, you have exceeded the copyright license that has been granted to you and you have, therefore, just run afoul of about 80 volumes of U.S. and International copyright laws. Worse still: You have left yourself open to an "infringement of copyright" lawsuit that provides for penalties of up to $150,000 per infringement. (You read that correctly. For more information on this critical issue, please see our document on Image Piracy].
The same would be true if you use an image in an ad and purchase rights for three insertions of that ad -- but then run it four times.
If you DO run it four times, and if your relationship with the photo agency is good, maybe they will simply charge you a "normal" price for the extra insertion, when they find out about it. They might do that, but they don't have to. If they choose to do so, they can pursue you for the above-mentioned infringement of copyright "remedy", and it is an unfortunate fact that there are agencies out there who will be delighted if you DO exceed the license you have purchased so they CAN make just such a magilla out of it.
Purchase all the rights you need, without fail. Do what's necessary to find out exactly what the intentions are for the use of the project you are working on. If necessary, go to the "powers that be" and explain that you need to purchase "rights" for the photographs, and the only way to do that is to know the entire potential scope of the project. We've had advertising agency clients tell us that as a matter of routine they get their clients to sign a document that states explicitly which rights should be purchased. Is it a cover-your-rear-end document? You bet it is.
Some projects are evolutionary, and what you do with it later will depend on how it performs in its early stages of distribution. It happens, and that can make your rights purchase tricky. But it will be vastly simplified if you adhere to Axiom number four...
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