Youth Sports Magazine Covers

[vbriner]

I've been reading on this forum for a couple months but have never posted anything. I do want to say that this is a great and very informative forum. I think I'm on it almost every day.

I have a question about youth sports photography. I want to create my own magazine cover for an upcoming soccer assignment. I noticed some photographers offer a Sports Illustrated cover. Does anyone know how to go about using something like that? What about copyright issues? Do the printing companies have permission from SI or is it the photographers that are getting the permission?

Thanks.

[dmwierz]

I've been reading on this forum for a couple months but have never posted anything. I do want to say that this is a great and very informative forum. I think I'm on it almost every day.

I have a question about youth sports photography. I want to create my own magazine cover for an upcoming soccer assignment. I noticed some photographers offer a Sports Illustrated cover. Does anyone know how to go about using something like that? What about copyright issues? Do the printing companies have permission from SI or is it the photographers that are getting the permission?

Thanks.

SI has only licensed this "feature" to a couple national sports photography groups. Using the SI cover (or ESPN, the Mag, as I have seen) is a definite copyright violation. Doing so for your own use is not going to ruffle anyone's feathers, and even if you're selling your stuff, the odds are it's not gonna even end up on their RADAR, but it is definitely illegal.

You don't even want to know how much it costs to license from SI.

What most legit shooters do is develop a knock-off magazine cover, naming it "Soccer Illustrated", or something similar, using the same fonts and layouts as SI would use. This is considered as marginally "OK", but technically, even this violates the "look and feel" of SI's copyright.

ESPN came after one of the national sports photography companies a while back, because their name and font style was an not-so-suttle copy of the ESPN logo and very close to the same name. I believe they settled on a fee for use, but I'm not sure.

[richrulz]

Try this.............

http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/magazine.php (http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/magazine.php)

[mtd]

Try this.............

http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/magazine.php (http://bighugelabs.com/flickr/magazine.php)

Hey thanks for that link! I'm workin on a project for a soccer team also. The template is a little limited for what I need, but it's great to print out as a proof & guide before I start designing it in Photoshop.

[vbriner]

Thanks for the info. I figured it was copyrighted; I just didn't know if they did something special for youth sports. How can the labs afford it? One photographer, couple hours away from my area, offered it last year. I don't know what lab they use. I did take the suggestion for "Soccer Illustrated" and did something similar. I like designing things myself. I can't seem to find one canned design that I like. I am all about copyrights and keeping things legit. I don't want to take any chances.

Thanks for the responses.