i was talking to a designer friend of mine recently who has worked in the region for years. when i showed him my work on istock he said he would just right click on the images save them then clone out the watermark in photoshop. when i said that that's theft he said okay then, he'd just download them from hero turko or somewhere similar for free. when i said no, they are also nicked he said, that's the good thing about working in the middle east, no one gives a cr*p about this stuff.
I had exactly the same conversation with a Filipino junior designer in Manila 2 years ago. But he used Getty as "image source" since the previews there seem to be larger. His job was to clone out the watermarks,
and his boss published a set of local lifestyle mags, so he could well afford it. Artful cloning might take two hours, but what the heck in a country where the hourly wage is on average 0.7$. Copyright infringement? Hahahaha. Copyright doesn't exist east of Berlin and west of Anchorage (except Japan and maybe South Korea). When you buy any desktop PC in the Philippines, Windows and Photoshop CS4 are preloaded
by default.
Turkey has a population of 80M, sure, but most are located in poor Anatolia. The upcoming industry is all about low grade outsourcing. They will enter the EU? They wish. Obama and the EU politicians want it but not the Europeans themselves. Whenever the citizen gets the chance (the France and Netherlands referendum) it was turned down. I wouldn't hold my breath.
If you look at visitors at stock sites and design or open source forms, the only non-Western country that
contributes is India. I'm connected with outsourcing in India (Chennai) and the designers there are top-notch. Since they work for Western companies, they won't even dream scavenging thumbs: they buy. I'm unaware of FT addressing India, but they should give it priority over Turkey. On the other hand, Indians are very knowledgeable in English, since it's in their grade and high school curriculum, so a localized version is overkill.
