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Originally Posted by sagelike31
But I have been hearing a lot of grumbling about having people sign these model releases. Any thoughts?
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I sell microstock via my online gallery, and so I spent some time a while back researching this, because there's so much conflicting info on the subject out there. I ended up buying a legal handbook for photographers written by an attorney who specializes in intellectual property rights which contained alot of valuable information on the subject. According to the book, for your own legal protection, you should obtain a model release if you plan to publish, sell, or do anything with a photo of people other than retain it for personal use. However, one thing this attorney pointed out was that the model release should actually be as short and simple as possible, which surprised me. He said many photographers believe they need to use lengthy, complicated model releases (such as the excerpt you posted above), and this kind of model release could actually end up causing you more legal problems than protection, depending on the court's interpretation of it. He said the courts will consider the clarity of the wording, the likelihood that the model indeed understood the entire scope of the release, and any possible intent to deceive, among other things, of course, and this could work against the photographer. He did provide a sample release in the book, and it was bare minimum, only about a paragraph and required only the date and signature from the model. I personally use one slightly longer, but I've tried to keep it simple, to the point, and easy to understand. However, *when* a model release is required is a whole other topic, I suppose. For instance, (according to the book), you can photograph street scenes with people in the photo, provided it is obvious that the subject of the photo was an event or location and that the people are only incidentally included in the photograph. I think it would be best to do as you're doing, that is, get as much info as you can about the subject and then just decide for yourself.