allow photo usage or not...

[manaheim]

Ask for a credit to be carved on the headstone

Lol so wrong.

 

[texkam]

Years ago while at an ad agency, I was asked to do an illustration from a photo for a headstone. .....I got no credit line. : (

 

[Sleepy_Sentry]

There isn't any set price or compensation model for this kind of thing. You can ask for whatever you like, or nothing.

You probably should draft a little contract up, but if you're not asking for a pile of money hiring a lawyer to help out is going to be a money-losing proposition. You can probably do a web search and get some boilerplate you can use, but don't go nuts making a 17 pager. A contract is, ultimately, just an agreement between parties, and there's really only two sensible ways to go:

- draft something small and pretty informal that lays out what you want, and accept that if someone wants to lawyer up it's probably going to get broken
- hire a lawyer and draft something large and complicated that will require a LOT of lawyering to break

That's a nice picture, and I like it'll look good on a headstone. It's simple, strongly graphical.

It's possible that the headstone company doesn't actually need your permission here, by the way, depending on how they plan to reproduce it. If they're carving a new picture based on yours, and it's a single copy, and some other criteria which I don't know much about, they can probably just go ahead. In that case, they're just being nice. If they're doing some digital print that's truly just a reproduction, then they probably do need your permission.

Consult a lawyer if you're interested in the details, or if it really matters to you and you want to double-check me (which you should, if it really matters to you), or read a good book. Buckster has a book that sounds excellent, maybe he'll turn up here, or you could PM him for the title.

Etching the photo on a headstone, even if some slight changes are made, is not sufficiently transformative for the headstone company to get away without a license.