Stock agencies do a very poor job of advising photographers what to shoot. Most successful businesses try to keep the people producing their products well informed about what is selling and what isn’t. They don’t want their workers wasting time (and costing them money) producing products no one wants to buy.
The Mega Agency has launched an innovative new service to fight widespread copyright infringement – Mega Image Police (MIP).
The company, a leading provider of news, sports and entertainment content, has beta launched an initiative to quickly identify stolen content and actively pursue damages on behalf of its growing global contributor base.
When I entered the photography profession “Seeing Was Believing.” If there was a visual record of something, then it really happened. Photos were much more important records of events than just words. A still image might not provide an accurate, overall understanding of a particular event, but at least it was an accurate rendition of a moment in time.
No more!
All photographers around the world who are trying to control and earn money from their work should watch, very carefully, what the European Parliament does with
Article 13 of its Copyright Directive. The final EU decision could greatly benefit all photographers whether they live in the EU or not. Tech industry leaders, like
Google and
YouTube, strongly oppose this legislation, because it could force them to use automated content filtering systems to insure that copyrighted material is not being distributed without permission on their platforms. The law states that digital companies should put "effective content recognition systems" in place.
Getty Images has just sent out a promotion – probably mostly to photographers – to show
Conceptual Realism. The implication is that customers want more of this type of imagery and photographers should be shooting more of it and supplying it to the agency.
Is Such Imagery Really What Customers Want? I can’t believe that most of what is being shown in this gallery are images that customers are actually licensing for use.
Many in the industry are concerned about the level of Getty Images debt and what that might mean for the future of the company. The following is some general information about the financial status of the company. It is not clear how the debt might affect the future. Getty Images has about $2.367 billion in debt. About $1.8 billion of that is in Term Loans at 4.37%. Back in 2012 they had about $2 billion in Term Loans so in the past six years it appears they have paid down about $200 million of the principal in addition to the annual interest. The terms of these loans is unclear and may vary.
Getty Images, has agreed to make Getty’s award-winning collection of sports, news, entertainment, archival and creative images available to enhance the voice responses from Alexa on all Echo devices with a screen. Exactly how image creators will be compensated for this use of their images has not been explained.
In an effort to drive more Marketplace sales
Storyblocks has lowered its commission to 50%. When the company (then known as Videoblocks) launched its Marketplace offering in 2015 the company offered still images and video clips at dramatically, discounted prices compared to its competitors. However, they paid creators 100% of the money received from the licensing of their work. As a result creators ended up earning more for each image licensed than they would if the image was licensed by one of the other stock agencies that paid royalties that were a small percentage of the total license fee.
On September 12th the European Parliament voted in favor of a Copyright Directive by more than 200 votes. The Directive will provide tools to ensure fair remuneration for creators. The landslide vote is clear evidence that the EU intends to apply some controls on the tech giants.
Specialist marine photo library,
Image Quest Marine, is re-launching with the appointment of a new library team. Eleanor Novick is joining the archive as Library Manager, bringing 10 years of industry experience, including over six years working as Senior Picture Researcher at Lebrecht Photo Library.