I'm still annoyed that Google bowed down to them in their litigation settlement. Getty wanted have their cake and eat it too, by having Google surface the images, but not really surface the images. Google should have treated it like any other DMCA copyright infringement case and removed Getty images from their index. It would have allowed Google users to use more free images, and Getty would have no copyright claim.
Instead Google removed their direct image button, frustrating all users of their platform.
> Getty has been criticized for selling the rights to photos that are freely available in the public domain. Searching for images on the web can sometimes mitigate this issue. Search by Image (maintainer here) can help you to quickly find alternative sources for images. It also supports several stock photo sites, so price comparison becomes easier. Visit the extension's options to enable the search engines you need.…
Does this give significantly better results than just Google and TinEye? They often fail me.
Registered on Shutterstock 11 months ago, added 9 photos, sold 3 for a grand total of $0.75. Selling stock photos made sense for photographers 10-20 years ago, not worth it anymore unless you're at the very top. For the reference: https://www.shutterstock.com/g/MateoSan
Nice photos but they are very "run of the mill". I can probably find thousands of "snowy mountains" pics, many of them with a free license.
Right, photos are average at best. I was looking to sell based on location / area where the photos were taken and it worked to some degree - all 3 purchases are from Germany and France.
It's just that there are too many photos and photographers out there these days. All pro photographers I've met were struggling to make a living off of it.
Most of those images still require visible attribution, which is a non-starter for most commercial use. Advertisers don't want a big "image from flickr user foobar" right on top of the photo in their glossy magazine ad.
Furthermore, if there are recognizable people in them, they don’t have model release forms which are needed for things like ads.
Yes, publicity rights will always be messy. But there's a ton of free content that doesn't involve depicting actual living humans, where those would be an issue.
> I appreciate the work of photographers, but plunking down $500 for a high-res photo and knowing they're going to resell that same photo to others god knows how many more times has always rubbed me the wrong way. Honestly, that doesn't bother me that much. What's truly absurd is wedding photography. Photographers get paid $1000+ and keep the copyright. Almost every other work-for-hire intellectual job involves an IP…
I agree somewhat with you, but might be able to put a bit more perspective on this. Photographers use their work product as advertising, so attach their name to their work. They also often do any retouching themselves. This, along with copyright preventing modification of the images, allows those images to accurately reflect the abilities of the photographer. It's a lot like software licensing in that way. As a compa…
This is silly. The most important "ability" of a wedding photographer, bar none, is to not screw up the part where they're actually capturing photos of the event. A wedding is a one-time event that people care a lot about, so this alone is probably well worth the $1000+ premium. Retouching the photos is something that anyone will be able to do at any time, given the untouched originals.
Surprised there was no mention of the upcoming threat of AI stock photos, and how easy it will be to generate massive amounts of these fast and cheap. Ne real people, who won't have to sign contracts or be paid. https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/20/20875362/100000-fake-ai-p...
Surprised there was no mention of the upcoming threat of AI stock photos, and how easy it will be to generate massive amounts of these fast and cheap. Ne real people, who won't have to sign contracts or be paid. https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/20/20875362/100000-fake-ai-p...
The (human) models and photographers will be in real trouble when generative models are able to make an ad on the fly with a fake person who looks like your neighbor with the best landscaping using the advertised lawnmower.
Um, last I checked, AI models of humans looked super, super creepy. Not the sort of content you would want on a marketing campaign, that's for sure.
Surprised there was no mention of the upcoming threat of AI stock photos, and how easy it will be to generate massive amounts of these fast and cheap. Ne real people, who won't have to sign contracts or be paid. https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/20/20875362/100000-fake-ai-p...
Lately I've been imagining what it would take to create an AI-generated food image. It's super hard! Just the rights management issue of the training set is a tough question. Then you have to account for quality, direction and dimensionality of light, food styling, props, custom products or ingredients, the list of challenges goes on an on. Then after the image is produced, if you're a food company, all your imagery…
I do wonder if the rights management issue is impacted by the decision referenced in this article regarding training machine learning models on copyrighted material:
There is a startup yet to be founded to sell inexpensive, high-quality original photos for exclusive use. Unique photos, i.e. photos not considered "duplicate content", are critical if you want to rank organically on Google [0] Getty will eventually be disrupted. [0] https://www.rebootonline.com/blog/long-term-duplicate-image-...
A long time ago I was Chief Data Scientist at 500px following the acquisition of a company I cofounded and this was exactly what I was advocating for. Professional photographers are cash poor, but with the right interface and contracts we could have done it. I wasn't able to get the CEO to see things my way and other problems with the company led to my departure, but I still think this is a viable business. The key here is what is meant by "inexpensive" because $500 is inexpensive to BMW but expensive to a startup.
Getty is the epitome of the evil corporation. They threatened a number of my customers (who all won against Getty via lawyers) for putting photos on their sites with dubious ownership rights. I have experience with copyright law (unpleasantly) and there is a process required by the law to actually win a settlement on copyright infringement, and Getty uses thug tactics and threats to get small parties to pay up. Their…
ah yes...
"Internet rages after Google removes “view image” button, bowing to Getty"