Hi everyone,

I've been following this conversation and I just wanted to let you all know that I just reported 250 shops to Etsy who sell digital downloads that have prohibited stock imagery in them.

If you would like the list yourself so you can also report them all to Etsy, please ping me and I'd be happy to email that list to you. If enough people report these shops, Etsy takes the listings and/or shops down.

Couldn't some of those shops legitimately belong to the photographers who own the copyright?

Hi everyone,

I've been following this conversation and I just wanted to let you all know that I just reported 250 shops to Etsy who sell digital downloads that have prohibited stock imagery in them.

If you would like the list yourself so you can also report them all to Etsy, please ping me and I'd be happy to email that list to you. If enough people report these shops, Etsy takes the listings and/or shops down.

Yes, did you check to see so that the stores contain images from several stock accounts? Not just one.

There's nothing more annoying than having your legitimate store taken down on false grounds.

Why should these scammers who stay at home make big bucks of your hard work. None have even lifted a camera to take a picture!

They shouldn't. But checking 250 shops against stock libraries and making sure there are pictures from several accounts would take a very long time.

That's why we're asking if she checked, or just reported any store selling digital files...

Plenty of people who sell on stock sites also sell on Etsy, their own images, perfectly legitimate. Getting trigger happy and reporting anyone selling digital downloads is not the way to go.

But if she checked all of these stores and made sure the images were gathered from several stock sources, then absolutely.

Hi everyone,

I've been following this conversation and I just wanted to let you all know that I just reported 250 shops to Etsy who sell digital downloads that have prohibited stock imagery in them.

If you would like the list yourself so you can also report them all to Etsy, please ping me and I'd be happy to email that list to you. If enough people report these shops, Etsy takes the listings and/or shops down.

Nice work.  But unless Etsy changes their policies, won't 250 new pirate shops show up to replace the ones taken down today?

I took a look, nothing of mine is being resold, but then I noticed this, People selling downloads direct on Etsy? I didn't look at the costs to see what I could get for something of mine, but doesn't that seem risky since anyone can pay for a download, get a perfect file and start reselling it?

Anyone can pay for a download and start reselling it anywhere. It probably happens every minute of every hour every day.

To LivingstoneAtLarge and other sellers on Etsy I ask :  the reason why I would not sell stock images in large numbers at Etsy is that you have to pay money (about 20 cents) per file, which would be quite a lot of money if I would do that with thousands of images.   Is this also true for larger quantities?  And if yes, then I understand why you sell them as "collections"!

It's .20 per listing.....and you can make, say, 100 copies available, or a 1000, whatever for that same .20.
Then there is a fee when it sells.  (3.5%)

So, if I sell a digital file for $7 on the first one I have lost the .20 listing cost and the 3.5% sale cost (.25). I clear $6.55 on the first one and $6.75 on all the rest I listed for that .20 fee.

The listings stay active for 4 months. If I sold even one download it would be better than selling it 19x on SS. (And let's face it. I'm not going to sell a plain old rabbit 19x on SS or DT.)

As to the downloading and reselling by others. Apparently they're doing that anyway from SS and DT. The likelihood of me catching them is slim. I might as well make as much as I can per file wherever I can. (IMHO)

For me the real time and effort (besides taking the shot, which I already have a couple hundred thousand sitting around doing nothing) is the artwork, editing, resizing for easy printing, uploading. Which does take a fair amount of time, once.

$100 a day is still much better than anything I am doing with the agencies I am with......for rabbits and llamas and flowers. 

It says you have 147 sales, so you're making far from $100 per day then?

No. I never said I was making $100 a day. I was going off the posts that said they (The Lola site) are making a $1000 a day that got whittled down to $100 a day.

I have only a few things up. What I am saying is that if I followed their business model with a lot of my own images that I have sitting around, I might. I'm considering it for sure.