Wedding Photos And Copyright

Who owns the copyright of your wedding photos? For that matter, who owns any of the photos that you might have commissioned someone else to take? The recent case of Wang Choong Li v Wong Wan Chin [2015] SGHC 128, where the plaintiff sued a photo agency for copyright infringement regarding her wedding photographs, raises these questions.

In the case of wedding photography, and even photography in general, does the customer own the copyright?

Were the photographs commissioned?

The most important enquiry is whether the customer commissioned the photographs in question. This decides who owns the copyright of the photographs. If there is no evidence that the photographs were commissioned, the copyright of such photographs would lie with its author. The natural "author" of a photograph is the photographer.