MicrostockGroup

Hi all,

I always have a questions, as RF license can be used for multiple times in general, and sold many times, so it is difficult to track.

So how we know a buyer will buy 'on demand' or 'extend license' instead of the normal subscriptions or downloads? are all these transactions  are based on the honesty of buyers?

Is there a way to get compensations when if some buyers didn't buy extended license?
 

DMCA letters if you have a lot of time

It's based on honesty yes. Agencies sell tens of thousands of licenses a day, who is going back days, weeks and months later to check back which customer used an image in the right or wrong way?

From my experience there is a good chance that people used your images not appropriately whenever you find them printed on products.

I've brought this up before many times:
I found my images on ebay, Zazzle, Cafepress, custom OD print site etc. and I when contacted the owners/sellers it turned out that NOT ONE of them had purchased even a regular RF license.

This is indeed a huge problem. I wish I had kids that could send out threatening claims all day long to people using my images without ANY licenses.

There is not enough time and not enough manpower to get this under control.

I'm pretty much only sending out DMCA letters to folks that host my images in full resolution and Google picks those up and are publicly available for download again.

A week ago one of the biggest newspaper in Holland used an image of mine twice. By coincidence I found these pictures as I normally never reed this paper. No Extended License had been bought for that image either. I send them an e-mail giving them the chance to buy the EL. No response so far. It seems even some big boys don't care about Licenses...

Yes, it's up to the honesty of the buyers and also their knowledge of licensing. Probably mostly ignorance. They may not read the license agreement or not know there are restrictions.

That's one of the problems with RF licenses. They don't specify the customer or usage so when you find the image somewhere you have no idea if it's a legit purchase. You either need to have the agency contact them or contact them yourself.

RM may be a pain to buyers but RF is a pain to contributors. We need a new or revised RF license that gets rid of the word "free", names the customer, and limits the image to a single customer/project, single use, and a specified time. That way when we find the image we can immediately tell if it's legit.

The other problem I've seen a lot of is copying. Someone buys your image, posts it online, and dozens of other people copy it and use it. With Google images I've found dozens, or maybe even hundreds, of potential thefts. Hard to tell which one bought it or stole it. 

Before I got into selling images I thought that Royalty Free meant that you didn't have to pay for it. I would never have thought twice about googling an image and using it for whatever reason, which would only have been school projects etc for the kids.   It was quite a shock to me to find out that I had actually been stealing.  It had never even occured to me that any image available through google was not there for general use. I'm sure that many many people are the same which is why I never go after anybody using my images on blogs, facebook etc. On comercial sites I will always send a DMCA when I find misuse.

Same here; I think that is an extremely stupid term. I don't know who coined it, but they should have thought about it for a few more minutes and realized the implications.

Wikipedia has an interesting description of royalty-free:
"In stock photography RF is one of the four common licenses or business models together with Rights Managed, subscription and micro."

Almost as bad as iStock, which continues to call their commercial collection "RF" (as in, playing cards with certain designs "may not be submitted to the Royalty-Free collection"). Unless such playing cards are another example of things not allowed in editorial-lite.

You can't track the image use reliably, even with all the new image tracking technology available. Just another hole in the business model.