Death Of Rights Managed Licensing

Posted on 11/6/2019 by Jim Pickerell | Printable Version | Comments (2)

Getty is shutting down all Rights Managed licensing on www.gettyimages.com. This may effectively be an end to the entire marketing strategy of pricing stock images based on how they are used. While there are still a number of small and mid-sized agencies that continue to price images based on usage, it seems highly unlikely that they will be able to continue to build their image collections or attract many customers in the future. Every stock photographer and stock agent should read this explanation of Getty’s plans for “phased retirement of rights-managed creative images.”

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Comments

Frank Golomb Posted Nov 9, 2019
This sounds to me that there will be a lot of RM Collections and consequently lifeworks "homeless" in a while. Because a change from RM to RF might cause conflicts with the licence history the image had before. There might be conflicts with copyright laws.

Doug Segal Posted Nov 11, 2019
What they don't cover in Getty's RM obituary:
A) Will photographers be given an opportunity to convert their existing RM material to RF? (reading between the lines near the bottom of this essay, it seems like the answer to this will be NO...but they are not explicit). Appreciate what you are saying Frank but as about 98% of RM images listed on Getty were never previously licensed at all, it doesn't make sense to not allow those contributors to convert them to RF, does it? Think of the money, time and effort invested to edit, scan, retouch, keyword,etc those many millions of images?

B) Makes one wonder about the accuracy of their extensive customer market research used to make the determination to boot RM, "We conducted extensive customer research and testing on RF versus rights-managed (RM)..", , if, presumably, it was the same type of customer market research done earlier in the year which they claim turned out to be dead wrong about their Market Freeze offering ?
" Earlier this year, we introduced Market Freeze to differentiate rights-managed (RM) from RF Stills by including a base level of exclusivity with RM licenses. This has not seen the customer interest we had expected, and RM licenses and revenue continue to rapidly decline."
So it goes.

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