Author Topic: RF license usage, how to monitor? (Read 5810 times)

mtkang · « **on:** August 12, 2011, 12:02 »

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?

louoates · « **Reply #1 on:** August 12, 2011, 12:10 »

Apart from the microstock sites monitoring any image use you have little chance to do so yourself. Even if you find a violation you have next to no chance to collect. And you must by now understand that many of your items will be stolen and used without anyone's knowledge. It's a wild, lawless world out there on the web so most of us simply accept that fact.

luissantos84 · « **Reply #2 on:** August 12, 2011, 12:13 »

DMCA letters if you have a lot of time

mtkang · « **Reply #3 on:** August 12, 2011, 12:18 »

oic..so it is only honest people will pay for extended license.. thank them!

Quote from: louoates on August 12, 2011, 12:10

Apart from the microstock sites monitoring any image use you have little chance to do so yourself. Even if you find a violation you have next to no chance to collect. And you must by now understand that many of your items will be stolen and used without anyone's knowledge. It's a wild, lawless world out there on the web so most of us simply accept that fact.

click_click · « **Reply #4 on:** August 12, 2011, 12:19 »

Quote from: mtkang on August 12, 2011, 12:02

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?

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.

RacePhoto · « **Reply #5 on:** August 12, 2011, 21:35 »

Quote from: luissantos84 on August 12, 2011, 12:13

DMCA letters if you have a lot of time

How much income do I make for a DMCA letter and my time to send it? What do people who receive these have to pay or what penalty is there for the illegal use?

click_click · « **Reply #6 on:** August 12, 2011, 21:37 »

Quote from: RacePhoto on August 12, 2011, 21:35

Quote from: luissantos84 on August 12, 2011, 12:13
DMCA letters if you have a lot of time

How much income do I make for a DMCA letter and my time to send it? What do people who receive these have to pay or what penalty is there for the illegal use?

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.

luissantos84 · « **Reply #7 on:** August 13, 2011, 00:05 »

Quote from: RacePhoto on August 12, 2011, 21:35

Quote from: luissantos84 on August 12, 2011, 12:13
DMCA letters if you have a lot of time

How much income do I make for a DMCA letter and my time to send it? What do people who receive these have to pay or what penalty is there for the illegal use?

never made one, don´t look much for my pictures

John W. · « **Reply #8 on:** August 13, 2011, 04:34 »

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...

red · « **Reply #9 on:** August 13, 2011, 07:48 »

If the newspaper run was less than 500,000 copies they don't need an extended license (depending on where they purchased it). Total print run may be hard to determine unless you have circulation figures. If they used it twice that might be a problem but maybe not depending on how many copies were printed. Here's one example of the RF usage wording (from istock) -

You may not - either individually or in combination with others, reproduce the Content, or an element of the Content, in excess of 500,000 times without obtaining an Extended License, in which event you shall be required to pay an additional royalty fee equal to US $0.01 for each reproduction which is in excess of 500,000 reproductions.

PaulieWalnuts · « **Reply #10 on:** August 13, 2011, 08:17 »

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.

madelaide · « **Reply #11 on:** August 13, 2011, 10:52 »

Quote from: PaulieWalnuts on August 13, 2011, 08:17

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.

That's my ideal for microstock too - actually I'd be happy with one single user, even if he uses it several times, but only when HE uses, not a client. I find it an absurd that a designer can purchase a group of images and use them with many different clients. But the way you propose the license, it isn't RF anymore, but a specific RM.

Quote

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.

I've seen that too, exact the same sizes, for instance. The other day I found the same image in two blogs, one of them was actually using the URL for the image on the other one. Hard to say this is not the same person/company with two blogs.

fotografer · « **Reply #12 on:** August 13, 2011, 11:15 »

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.

madelaide · « **Reply #13 on:** August 13, 2011, 12:50 »

That's a very common mistake. In Portuguese sites call it "Free of rights" - can you imagine that? I don't know if this the official name or just a bad translation.

In Shutterpoint, we can see the keywords used by people who visit our images and download a comp image, and not rarely they searched "free photo <subject>".

KB · « **Reply #14 on:** August 13, 2011, 16:09 »

Quote from: fotografer on August 13, 2011, 11:15

Before I got into selling images I thought that Royalty Free meant that you didn't have to pay for it.

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.

Sean Locke Photography · « **Reply #15 on:** August 13, 2011, 18:40 »

""In stock photography RF is one of the four common licenses or business models together with Rights Managed, subscription and micro."

Silly people.

cardmaverick · « **Reply #16 on:** August 14, 2011, 01:39 »

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

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Author Topic: RF license usage, how to monitor? (Read 5810 times)

mtkang

louoates

luissantos84

mtkang

click_click

RacePhoto

click_click

luissantos84

John W.

red

PaulieWalnuts

madelaide

fotografer

madelaide

KB

Sean Locke Photography

cardmaverick

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