I thought the race to the bottom is when we're no longer earning money.

No, the bottom is when we're no longer earning any money but continue to allow agencies, social media sites and end users to use our images to earn money.

Unbelievable, isn't it? 

how about journalists? non-commercial as well? I wonder what is commercial then

https://twitter.com/Journalism2ls

Kings of scammers... Soon they will give our ass for free too.

Quote from: PaulieWalnuts on March 06, 2014, 08:31

I thought the race to the bottom is when we're no longer earning money.

No, the bottom is when we're no longer earning any money but continue to allow agencies, social media sites and end users to use our images to earn money.

It could be still worse. The next step would be, you have to pay for your images to be on Getty

Isn't that happening to photographer choice collection? They pay $50 to submit photo and to be given for free to bloggers.

I'm sure we will see sooner then later something like this.
"Getty images embedded free image player makes thousands of websites vulnerable to security breaks due to error in his player code" 

Quote from: StockPhoto on March 06, 2014, 07:15

And if we stopped upload files to ALL agencies for a month? It would be a major announcement, what we can do together.

you know that is impossible right?

It is only impossible if you think it is impossible.  There was a time when no one thought unions were possible. 

I would have no problem at all doing this for more than one month.

Quote from: luissantos84 on March 06, 2014, 07:20

Quote from: StockPhoto on March 06, 2014, 07:15

And if we stopped upload files to ALL agencies for a month? It would be a major announcement, what we can do together.

you know that is impossible right?

It is only impossible if you think it is impossible.  There was a time when no one thought unions were possible. 

I would have no problem at all doing this for more than one month.

you are a numbers guy and you know it is impossible, lets not dream about it, never was done before, ok there is stocksy with a very strict elite of members and symbio that lately had more fights than ever

unfortunately we cannot stick together, its just too much contributors, opinions, earnings, etc etc

Quote from: luissantos84 on March 06, 2014, 07:20

Quote from: StockPhoto on March 06, 2014, 07:15

And if we stopped upload files to ALL agencies for a month? It would be a major announcement, what we can do together.

you know that is impossible right?

It is only impossible if you think it is impossible.  There was a time when no one thought unions were possible. 

I would have no problem at all doing this for more than one month.

I uploaded 0 to iS between mid Dec and mid Feb, during which time I was uploading like a mad thing to FAA, not having realised that new work there was going right to the bottom of the default search, which was the main reason I wasn't uploading to iS. 

The Getty Viewer on your blog is controlling your advertising and income of which you will never see! You can't scale it to fit your blog so people will just rip the image out. You can easily strip the meta data in photoshop and bam put your own adds up. Ohh that is not how you are supposed to use it and Getty dose not want this to happen but you try to police 35million free images and you see you can't.

How would it work if you had a blog with no advertising?
(I shifted my short-lived blog to be hosted on my own webspace to avoid the advertising, but lost my 'audience', so gave up)

Love this quote from Getty:

Quote

�What we�ve seen is a significant amount of infringement online in an area, unfortunately, that we can�t control because this is how the Internet has developed,� senior vice president Craig Peters tells BJP.

And that loss of control has nothing to do with their exorbitant pricing, does it...



They can't control the market in the way they want to control it. The market has dictated that $55 for a blog image is ridiculous, and Getty being the spoiled little child they are decided that if people won't play by their rules they're going to take their ball and go home.

Well said - from my vantage point.  One other thing - since they don't like the "rules", they destroy the playing field for others.  Although in some courts that would be considered predatory, they claim its just "market realities".  And remember - they are owned by a group who buys a company, cleans it up and sells it in a year or two.  My guess is this is simply a move to maximize their selling price quickly (they are now an internet "player" like You Tube) and be gone. 

The fact that they killed the value of photos used online forever is irrelevant to the "big picture".  Remember, in the business world you'd always like to kill the competition - their brands and their company.  Some bright soul decided that giving away other people's photos could do this .... and do it legally.

As I've said elsewhere.....this is very clever.

And so very wrong.

Quote from: gbalex on March 06, 2014, 09:02

It is only impossible if you think it is impossible.  There was a time when no one thought unions were possible.

No, it's impossible.

How would you organize something like this? How would you communicate this plan to the majority of contributors, who don't read or post in forums?

It will not be difficult to get their attention now and we spread the news the same way Getty is doing it now. That by the way seems to be quite effective, then news is spreading like wildfire.

Hmm..

http://m.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-26463886

And quoting from the article:

"Getty will get its pound of flesh one way or another," (sic)

And again:

"My Twitter feed has exploded with very angry photographers going 'I don't want Getty giving away my images for free'," she said. (sic)

"For some of them, it might mean their images are never used commercially and they'll never make a penny. (sic)