MicrostockGroup

Quoting from Apogee Photo Magazine:

"Under the provisions of the revised copyright law, a photographer owns all rights to his pictures at the moment of creation. That means he and he alone owns the right to sell, use, distribute, copy, publish, alter or destroy his work of art. If you are a photographer, this ownership begins the moment you click the shutter."

The article then goes on to discuss the Work For Hire exception.

Flemish,

You're twisting what I've said, Sharply understood it clear enough. I haven't said anything about Dreamstime being committed to provide a disable button, if they were this thread wouldn't exist.

I'll try and explain, Dreamstime can disable an account and remove all images if they so wish, of course they can any site could do that, and they could do it immediately hence my phrase at the press of a button. Now I appreciate that might of confused you and it might take a press of two or maybe three buttons, but it still stands that they could do it, you've mentioned before that you know a bit about website design so I'm sure you'll be well aware how easy it would be to delete an account in a matter of seconds.

But just to make it ultra clear here's the extract from the Dreamstime T&C:

Dreamstime may restrict or remove your access to this site at any time, or restrict or remove the use of any Image for any reason

They can do it, everybody knows they can do it, but they make out that people have to remove images one by one for no other reason than being awkward.

When I joined DT there was no 6 month lock in period. That was introduced long after I joined. But when it was introduced it was only applied to new images, so if I didn't upload anything new I was free to leave without notice.
When I went exclusive with iStock I had to delete my portfio, image by image from DT, Shutterstock, Fotolia, BigStock and Stockexpert. None could offer a back office service to delete my portfolio for me, and nor did I expect them to. When I decided to go exclusive,  I factored in 20 hours of time to delete my images. They give you the tools to delete your images, just because you'd like the tools to be easier/faster doesn't mean they're being unreasonable. 

I'm certainly no apologist for DT, but as I don't know their back end system I wouldn't presume it to be a quick thing for them to do. If it is a simple matter of one click and you're history then indeed it would be a friendly extra thing for them to do. But if it took more than 5 minutes of staff time per contributor request, I personally wouldn't expect them to allocate resources to it.

A site would be foolish not to be able to disable an account very quickly.  Legal issues - especially copyright abuse and liability - could easily arise that would require it.  fred

Indeed, but as we've seen on several occasions, the success of some microstock sites appears to have outpaced their infrastructure. I wouldn't fall off my chair in amazement if procedures we assume to be automated and/or easy to do on all the sites just aren't.

I think we're deviating from Ichiro's original topic here. Not sure if he enjoys having it hijacked 

Anyway, I checked and found out that Dreams is not the only site that makes it difficult to delete your images. BigStock, Crestock, Moodboard,are also 3 I've found out that not only you cannot disable or delete it yourself, you have to write them.
Of the Big 6+3 ,seems like Fotolia and IS are the only two I know that actually allow you to delete by yourself.  Alamy requires an email to support.
Correct me if I am wrong.

thx for the tips Race. (sorry Ich!)

In Alamy, although you have to wait for 6 months for the image to disappear from the database, you can delete all the keywords and descriptions so the image will not be searchable anymore.

Bigstock will delete for you, if you email its support.

freedom, i don't think you can change the keywords, it's greyed out !

For the record, if you close your account with iStock your images are not held in the collection for any period of time after you close your account. If you dump exclusivity your images stay in the collection as they always have.

Note: when you dump exclusivity your status isn't changed to non-exclusive until 30 days after you initiate the process. And for clarity, you can't apply for exclusivity for 90 days after the process is complete.

Yay, I'm in a dreamstime thread kicking the knowledge in a thread that has drifted of the original topic.