Image use guidelines that seem to completely contradict themselves

Question

I have a set of image usage guidelines as follows:

USAGE OF AIRBUS IMAGES Digital images in high-resolution format may be downloaded from the Airbus Photo Gallery site. Obtaining any other format requires a special request.

All images have a visible and an invisible tag to track use of Airbus images.

Photographs may only be used by Airbus direct suppliers for their specific corporate communication materials destined for non-commercial purposes with the appropriate permission (please see hereafter: Airbus Photography permission requests). .

“Non-commercial use” of materials downloaded from the Airbus Photo Gallery for Suppliers is free of charge and is defined as corporate material limited to: - Corporate internal communications, portals and intranets - In house magazines, corporate presentations - Marketing and Public Relations materials (brochures, presentations, press releases) - Corporate external websites - Corporate annual reports - Tradeshows (presentations, press releases, marketing brochures, posters)

Any non-commercial material containing Airbus images must be accompanied by the Airbus copyright and the author or authors’ name(s) as required under French copyright law. The legal mention, shown hereafter, should be duly completed: “© Airbus SAS [year] by [photographer’s agency / photographer’s name]”.

Any photograph edited on a public website, must also be accompanied by the above mentioned copyright information with an additional note to the effect that Airbus images may not be downloaded by individuals or corporations for any reason.

Commercial use and use for profit are not authorised and are subject to royalties. Commercial or for-profit uses include:

• Print Advertising - consumer, trade, newspaper, brochure, catalogue, direct mail, point of purchase, billboard, transit, outdoor, airport
• Direct Mail – flyers, supplements, mailers (mailings), inserts
• Advertorial – magazine inserts, promotional
• Television - TV stills, TV commercial, infomercial, entertainment
• Website - banner, click-through, commercial
• CD-Rom, DVD - entertainment, games
• Packaging- product, music
• Gift Items -,T-shirts, hats, accessories, calendars, postcards, posters, cards, cups, mouse pads

I want to use an image of an A380 on a commercial website as a large image on the front page. The image was taken by myself and therefore i have artist's rights, but the image contains the airbus logo and A380 branding.

Can I use it or not??

(Yes I have emailed Airbus but have had no reply)

Answer 1

The guidelines you quoted are only for images obtained from Airbus, they simply do not apply to any images taken by you.

Any image you don't get from Airbus is not subject to their image use guidelines, technically speaking Airbus as no rights to your picture and can't tell you what to do with it - but you are subject to normal trademark/copyright law (the Airbus branding is obviously trademarked and the plane design may or may not be copyrighted).

I don't know if you can use the image or not, copyright/trademark law can be complex sometimes - and I'm not a lawyer and so not really qualified to answer your question, I've looked for trademark usage guidelines on the Airbus site and couldn't find any.