The U.S. Supreme Court says sovereign immunity protects state governments from copyright infringement lawsuits and has decided that it is OK for U.S. states to grab any photo they can find and use it without notifying or compensating the creator. The specific case that brought the matter to the nation’s highest court was filed by Rick Allen, an independent film producer and director in Fayetteville, North Carolina, who in the 1990s filmed the salvaging of the Queen Anne's Revenge, the flagship of the pirate Blackbeard, that had run aground at Beaufort, North Carolina in 1718.
“Sheltering in Place” will certainly hurt many photographers. Photographers won’t be able to get out to shoot new images. Customers won’t be coming to your studio. You might be able to shoot still lifes in your home, but getting props may be difficult. So what can you do to pay your bills? One possibility, particularly if you have a large stock photo collection, is to check out
Canva and see if they will pay a one-time fee to purchase rights to a significant number of your images for inclusion in their Free collection that they make available to their Graphic Design customers.
When the question of market leaders in the stock photo industry comes up the names photographers usually think about are Getty Images, Shutterstock, AdobeStock, iStock and Alamy. Maybe they should be thinking about the Australian company
Canva. The users and buyers of photographs are people who design products that needs visuals. Canva has been built to provide a host of services designers need to do their jobs.
As I pointed out in
yesterday’s story EyeEm is the single largest supplier of stock images to Getty’s Creative Collection. Currently 8,005,719 of the 30,472,764 images in Getty’s Creative Collection have been supplied by EyeEm. That’s 26% of the total collection making EyeEm by far the largest contributor to Getty Creative.
Due to the unforeseeable circumstances of the coronavirus pandemic the CEPIC Congress 2020 cannot be held from 27 to 29 May. In order to avoid the negative impact this cancellation would cause registered delegates, CEPIC has been able to secure new dates of 30 September to 2 October 2020 at the existing venue, Gran Meliá Victoria in Palma de Mallorca. There will be a Welcome Reception on 29 September.
This week, the U.S. Copyright Office announced some changes in its special handling requirements and some additional information about the impact of the coronavirus on the copyright registration system. You can find the complete announcement
here.
In the last four years there has been dramatic shifts within the Getty Images Creative Collection. It is unclear how this has affected gross revenue generated as Getty has stopped providing a public breakdown of the revenue segments of its business. Nevertheless, it is believed that since 2016 annual gross Creative revenue has consistently generated about $280 million of the company's roughly $850 million in gross revenue.