Selling POD stuff, are there any rules?

Microstock Photography Forum - General > Image Sleuth

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zsooofija:

--- Quote from: Free_Soul on December 30, 2020, 00:57 ---Amazon is complete fraud ;D they check nothing about sellers before putting up their products in their sites 😂😂

--- End quote ---

That is true, but who checks sellers these days? Do you know any PoD or microstock site that do check the products/content? I don't.

Uncle Pete:

--- Quote from: zsooofija on December 30, 2020, 07:09 ---
--- Quote from: Free_Soul on December 30, 2020, 00:57 ---Amazon is complete fraud ;D they check nothing about sellers before putting up their products in their sites 😂😂

--- End quote ---

That is true, but who checks sellers these days? Do you know any PoD or microstock site that do check the products/content? I don't.

--- End quote ---

Mostly I agree, the PODs do not check and most that I've seen, hide behind DMCA and do nothing. You have to file the claim. I haven't had the problem but some others here have reported sellers can file a counter claim and block us from our claims. Frustrating.

True most agencies don't seem to check in advance. How would you expect them to check the entire WWW for similar images? Agencies on their own have hundreds of millions of individual still images. I'll admit that some of those millions are the same images, but considering every upload and 150,000 new a day, for example, how do they check, every image? How would you do that if you were an agency?

Last, believe it or not, some agencies actually do check. :) Here's a rejection I got recently:

Rejection Reason

Image found on one or more stock agency sites and may infringe on another person's intellectual property rights.

Meaning they checked for similar and found similar on other agency sites. In fact I checked and found similar, but not the same as mine. I used a newspaper image from around 1872, which is fine and free to use, out of copyright. But because similars were found, using an image search, mine was rejected. Mine was not copied, and of course ;) mine is much better.

My objection is, that these POD places don't try to protect us, even when we make a claim. The agencies try to block us from contacting their customers, and I can see why, because of false claims and harassment, but then the agencies don't really do anything to help or protect us, much of the time?

Why bother filing or finding misuse if they - PODs and agencies - don't even try to help? Of course we're unhappy. Another part of this is, anything on the web can and might be stolen from us. The only place things are safe is by never trying to sell them. So we are stuck. Either have everything protected at home and never make a sale, or take the risk and put it up on the web for download.

There will be thieves and misuse.

henri:
"Also for the RF license: You can’t use the photos in products that you will then resell on a retail model, like a POD site. Someone would need an EL for POD sales. However as in the earlier posts, someone can advertise a product, lets say a large print, using our SS images (and many other sites that have API partners) to display the product for sale, and must pay for the license if they sell that product."

Uncle Pete, is this your personal opinion or can you give a link for this info? I didn't find any mention of PODs in Shutterstock TOS.

SS has a lot of affiliates, re-sellers and partners either selling directly or marketing SS content. Displaying embedded images from SS is naturally OK but displaying SS images with no reference to SS/artist is something else. If clicking the image takes you to the original image in SS then everything is just fine. I understand that with PODs embedding is problematic and so are watermarks. But the images must be, in my view, linked to SS if PODs are based on standard licenses per each purchase because otherwise there could be no control of PODs. If a POD site sells once, buys standard licence and receives original image, then SS could not control the POD site anymore. SS could be losing money.

So it would make sense for SS to require that either displayed images are embedded from SS or the reseller buys ELs. Both of these cases are OK and necessary for marketing. Both of these cases would also allow the artist to spot thefts. But the problem is PODs where there is no reference to original agency/artist/license - no ELS and no embedding. Like the cases I described in my first post to this thread.

It would be nice to find any info SS has itself released about rules concerning POD sites.

zsooofija:

--- Quote from: Uncle Pete on December 30, 2020, 10:41 ---
--- Quote from: zsooofija on December 30, 2020, 07:09 ---
--- Quote from: Free_Soul on December 30, 2020, 00:57 ---Amazon is complete fraud ;D they check nothing about sellers before putting up their products in their sites 😂😂

--- End quote ---

That is true, but who checks sellers these days? Do you know any PoD or microstock site that do check the products/content? I don't.

--- End quote ---

Mostly I agree, the PODs do not check and most that I've seen, hide behind DMCA and do nothing. You have to file the claim. I haven't had the problem but some others here have reported sellers can file a counter claim and block us from our claims. Frustrating.

True most agencies don't seem to check in advance. How would you expect them to check the entire WWW for similar images? Agencies on their own have hundreds of millions of individual still images. I'll admit that some of those millions are the same images, but considering every upload and 150,000 new a day, for example, how do they check, every image? How would you do that if you were an agency?

Last, believe it or not, some agencies actually do check. :) Here's a rejection I got recently:

Rejection Reason

Image found on one or more stock agency sites and may infringe on another person's intellectual property rights.

Meaning they checked for similar and found similar on other agency sites. In fact I checked and found similar, but not the same as mine. I used a newspaper image from around 1872, which is fine and free to use, out of copyright. But because similars were found, using an image search, mine was rejected. Mine was not copied, and of course ;) mine is much better.

My objection is, that these POD places don't try to protect us, even when we make a claim. The agencies try to block us from contacting their customers, and I can see why, because of false claims and harassment, but then the agencies don't really do anything to help or protect us, much of the time?

Why bother filing or finding misuse if they - PODs and agencies - don't even try to help? Of course we're unhappy. Another part of this is, anything on the web can and might be stolen from us. The only place things are safe is by never trying to sell them. So we are stuck. Either have everything protected at home and never make a sale, or take the risk and put it up on the web for download.

There will be thieves and misuse.

--- End quote ---

I don't expect agencies to check for thieves, I just said they don't. But I would expect them to act when contributors point out stolen content, and I expect them to delete the whole portfolio, not just the image in case.

Your example is probably one in a million with the agency that does check.

Why bother filing misuse? I personally bother because I would like to be paid for my work. And I do see the point, because this usage (PoD or resale on merch) requires an EL and I sold tens of thousands of regular licenses but only a couple of hundreds (max a thousand) of ELs over the last 12 years, so I think the chances they indeed bought the EL are pretty small. I never file misuse for uses that are allowed by the regular license.

I am not saying everyone should do that, I just said what works for me.

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