The internet has made it possible to publish almost any content with little effort, making copyright permissions something every content owner has to think about. Creative Commons works well to identify permissions when you want an item to be available to anyone under the same conditions. It does not work so well when you just want to give permission to one person or publisher. Then you need to think about what agreement you want to reach.

A copyright licence or permission assigning rights should be in writing. The Australian Copyright Council, sister organisation to the Copyright Council of New Zealand, provides a free information sheet for people looking to assign rights for their content. They suggest that any agreement should clearly identify the parties and the material involved, the owner of the copyright, the duration of the agreement including publication timeframes, and what attribution or credit you require. You may also want to consider other matters such as prohibiting the other party from assigning the rights to someone else, and a termination clause if things go wrong. The agreement should be signed by both parties, so if you are planning to use a letter, create two signed copies and ask the other party to sign and return one of them. You can download the information sheet in PDF format here.

Please note that DigitalNZ cannot provide legal advice, so you may also wish to seek this from a qualified professional.

What happens when the photograph is your property but the copyright ownership isn’t? Te Papa is often in this situation. Te Papa has a large photograph archive and considers both of these property rights (physical ownership & copyright) when supplying copies of photographs to others. Te Papa staff make sure that the customer knows when a photograph is in copyright. Customers are asked to contact copyright owners for a licence and must provide Te Papa with a copy of the licence before Te Papa will supply images to the customer. Copyright licenses are needed for any use other than those described in the fair dealing provisions of the NZ Copyright Act 1994.
A letter contract accompanies the copy image to the customer to ensure Te Papa’s rights as the owner of the photographs are respected. The letter contract tells the customer how they can use the copy image, what information should accompany the copy image when it is reproduced and ensures the customer understands that the contract covers this use of the copy image only. If, in the future, the customer wants to use the image in another way they they are instructed to contact Te Papa for permission for those uses. The letter contract also ensures that important information such as title, maker, date, and source of the image accompany the reproduction of the image. All of this is important for scholarly purposes and makes sure that researchers can trace back to the original image if they need to.

Further to my previous comment: Te Papa has traditional image licensing model that is common across many cultural institutions both in NZ and world wide. I think there are going to be changes in how cultural institutions handle image licensing as digitization and online access to collections increases. Here’s the web address to an interesting paper by Paula Bray from the Powerhouse Museum on this topic.
http://www.archimuse.com/mw2009/papers/bray/bray.html
I’d be interested hearing about what other cultural institutions in NZ are doing in this area.