Photographer
Espen Haagensen didn’t know his
photo of the Milky Way had been chosen for the background image on iPhone 6 until a colleague who was watching the iPhone 6 announcement gave him a call.
Earlier this year, after having found the image on 500px.com, an Apple representative called and purchased the rights for “non-advertising/broadcast use.” Later Apple extended the use for exclusive, 5-year use, but gave no indication as to exactly how they intended to use the image.
As a professional photographer Haagensen is also represented by
NTB/Scanpix in Norway, but he handled the negotiations for this use with Apple directly. He said, “Pricing was hard, I have never sold an image to such a large corporation with this kind of usage clause, I usually sell images for one-time use, either personally or through Scanpix or others.”
Haagensen created the original photograph of the Milky Way during a ski trip up a mountain in Norway in December 2013. When he shared then shared the photo on 500px it attracted a good deal of attention from the community. Apple chose to edit the small house out of the original photo to create a less distracting image.?
Comparisons
Back in 2001 there was a broad use of a similar nature by Microsoft when the company launched its XP operating system. In that case Microsoft licensed one of Chuck O’Rear’s images for the default background that would appear on the desktop of everyone who used the XP operating system. (If you can’t recall what that image looked like
check this link to a story that has a good picture of the screen.
Microsoft licensed use of the image from O’Rear’s agent Corbis for $135,000.00. O'Rear's had a contract with Corbis that paid him a 40% royalty and he received $54,000 of this sale. At the time this was one of the highest fees ever paid for the use of a single image. ??Microsoft was willing to pay this because they recognized that the image would be appearing on packaging and in all types of advertising for a major new product launch. It was not just going to be seen on users desktop screens.
When I asked Haagensen about the fee he received he said, “I am not really interested in disclosing the exact amount that I was payed, but what I can say is that it was substantially more that what I get for one-time usage of an image (from $80-$250 depending on the buyer). And way less than the figures you quote. I did not get rich, far from it. But I did get a lot of publicity here in Norway, and I hope that this will generate sales of some of my other images.”
I also asked if Haagensen had licensed the usage through
500pxprime.com. He said that he has no images available through 500pxprime. “When I reviewed the terms I found them to be mediocre, at best, for me, and there was quite a bit of paperwork in order to get an EIN number and be able to receive money. I did sell some images through 500px before they created prime, but the payout for each image was lousy so I have disabled the store for now. Now that I have all the necessary paperwork I might reconsider.”