The photographer owns your listing photos. Not the building owner, and not the agency that paid the invoice. In Canada that is the default, and it holds until someone signs something that changes it.
The commissioned-photo rule was repealed in 2012
Section 13(1) of the Copyright Act says the author of a work is the first owner of the copyright in it. Photographs used to have a carve-out: if you commissioned a photo and paid for it, the copyright was yours. That was section 13(2), and it was repealed in 2012. Commissioning a photograph now gives you no ownership at all.
One exception still matters. Section 13(3) gives copyright to the employer when the work was made in the course of employment. The leasing coordinator on your payroll who shoots a vacant unit is making work you own. A freelancer with an invoice is not, and neither is the brokerage photographer from an earlier listing.
An invoice buys a licence of unwritten scope
Money changed hands and files were delivered, so some permission exists. Nobody wrote down how much. Section 13(4) is blunt: an assignment of copyright is not valid unless it is in writing and signed by the owner of the right. A verbal "they are yours" is worth nothing.
There is a consumer exception at section 32.2(1)(f), and it looks like help until you read it. It covers an individual, using a photograph commissioned for personal purposes, for private or non-commercial purposes. A rental listing is commercial and a company is not an individual, so it fails twice over.
Scope bites at the moments you are not watching
- Syndication. Your feed pushes the same images out to every portal you distribute to, and each portal takes its own licence to display what it receives. Permission to use a photo is not permission to grant that permission onward. If your licence says nothing about sublicensing, your feed is doing something it never covered.
- Sale or handover. A licence granted to you does not travel to a buyer or an incoming manager unless it says so. Image rights belong on that handover list beside deposit balances and account ownership.
- Reuse across units. A shoot booked for one suite ends up marketing the forty units that look like it, and amenity photos resurface for the sister building two years later. Each is a separate use.
Moral rights sit outside the assignment
A written assignment does not finish the job. Section 14.1(2) says moral rights cannot be assigned, only waived, and 14.1(3) says an assignment is not by itself a waiver. Moral rights cover the integrity of the work and the author's right to be named. That turns concrete when you crop hard to fit a portal's aspect ratio, burn a promotion into the corner of an image, or run a photo through virtual staging.
What to check this week
- Pull your last three photography invoices and search for the word assign. If it is not there, you hold a licence of unknown scope, not ownership.
- List every place those images appear now: your site, each syndication destination, your brochures, your ads. That list is the scope you needed to buy.
- Put two separate clauses in your next photographer agreement: a written assignment of copyright signed by the photographer, and a waiver of moral rights. Neither implies the other.
- Ask for the right to sublicense and the right to transfer on a sale. Both cost nothing at booking and are painful to chase later.
None of this assumes a photographer is waiting to sue you. Copyright here runs for the life of the author plus seventy years, so the rights in a photo shot this month outlast your ownership of the building by decades. Those files get handed to owners and managers who were never in the room, so make sure the paperwork travelling with them says something.