Great catch stvagna as always.  126 stolen images from other people 

Thanks.

I've reported it to iStock.

joann, its an immense job for an agency to check millions of submitted images dragging them into google images one by one and then check through every returned result to see if it is legal usage or an infringment, not saying you are wrong, just saying its an immense manual job i am not expecting them to do.

joann, its an immense job for an agency to check millions of submitted images dragging them into google images one by one and then check through every returned result to see if it is legal usage or an infringment, not saying you are wrong, just saying its an immense manual job i am not expecting them to do.

but SS in particular are telling us what great technology they have ...surely they can automate checking their own portfolio AT LEAST.

joann, its an immense job for an agency to check millions of submitted images dragging them into google images one by one and then check through every returned result to see if it is legal usage or an infringment, not saying you are wrong, just saying its an immense manual job i am not expecting them to do.

You don't have to do it all the time for all submissions. I'm guessing that most of the cheats start out as cheats, so you only have to monitor new accounts closely - lets say for the first xx uploads. I very much doubt that contributors of many years standing suddenly turn to a life of copyright infringement.

And given the hoopla about visual image search and similar images at Shutterstock I would expect the check to be automated, not manual. I need to use Google images, but the agencies - bigger ones at least - don't have to.

The agencies need to earn their 50-60-70-85% of the gross, and protecting our content should be part of that.

what if this guy has two alias? Same owner different nickname?

yes the search can be automated but then what? enlighten me. how does the script tell you which images is infringing copyright or is stolen.

right,  my bad,  you are talking about in house  portfolio search, i was referring to the Internet,  ill let myself out

Quote from: Microstockphoto on November 29, 2016, 05:04

joann, its an immense job for an agency to check millions of submitted images dragging them into google images one by one and then check through every returned result to see if it is legal usage or an infringment, not saying you are wrong, just saying its an immense manual job i am not expecting them to do.

Is it really that hard to automate it and find the people that are uploading stolen images from lots of different portfolios?  I would of thought someone would be capable of coding something to do that.

Shutterstock recently sent an email to almost every contributor threatening us to change our spammy titles.
Bigstock tinkered with their categories earlier this year and their system stopped reading metadata.
iStock....bleh...nevermind
Alamy has been working all year to simplify their upload process.
123RF won't even review files unless you write them an email asking them to do it.
PhotoDune can't even accept new photos anymore.

You guys really want them to try to automate catching cheats?  Seriously, what are the chances any of them could pull that off without accidentally banning half their contributors?

automate what and how ? how do you want to automate this process when the results of a reverse search are incredibly ambiguous

It honestly wouldn't be that hard to automate into their reviewing procedure ... They could show like, the top 10 closest reverse image results in a little thumbnail gallery and see where that photo's already been indexed online ...

joann, its an immense job for an agency to check millions of submitted images dragging them into google images one by one and then check through every returned result to see if it is legal usage or an infringment, not saying you are wrong, just saying its an immense manual job i am not expecting them to do.

Oh please. Have you ever seen ACDsee duplicate finder? You could simply set what "level" of similarity it has to check against.

It's naturally a work for a software or bot. There are also 3d party services and one living in a copyright management world could to that investmet.
They simply are NOT investing in copyright infringiment protection and control.
They could also make some "secret" fingerprint in their copy of the file to differentiate it from the one of the other agencies. Instead they simply answer "you are not exclusive, we can't say if your file was stolen from our agency".

Great. Do something to make this possible!

Since we don't do something as a "mass" to protect our rights, and they have substantial profit margin, they simply don't care a sod.

They are not an author-driven company. They are a "infrastructure-driven" company. Somethimes here and there they say "oh we love you, we cannot exist without you xoxoxo" ... but they cover their own asses in every legal way. Not ours. They protect themselves from US and from customers.

They are not really working side by side WITH us. They simply try not to let us upset too much and to decently reward customers.

There is a high level of automation, software, machines. And a very low level of humanity, everywhere.

So ... adapt and survive.

There's more stolen work:

AlexeyWork: http://www.istockphoto.com/dk/photo/poster-on-the-wall-of-retro-cafe-restaurant-gm605761586-103858391?st=f7aa522

mtlapcevic: http://www.shutterstock.com/pic-237137632/stock-photo-mock-up-poster-on-the-wall-of-retro-hipster-cafe-restaurant-interior-background-d-render.html