Thanks for enquiring Rob - I wonder how long it would have taken them to remove the collection if you hadn't asked?

It's really disheartening that Getty will hand over royalties to the bankrupt EyeEm - I understand their contractual obligations, but I have to wonder if they could have removed the EyeEm collection from sale immediately and started talks with TalentHouse/EyeEm to try and get the payments to contributors directly.

There were posts here about contacting Getty to remove EyeEm files as they weren't getting paid - months ago - and Getty refusing to. Really shoddy treatment of contributors.

https://www.microstockgroup.com/general-stock-discussion/getty-takedown-request/

I understand the point, and would love to see it differently too, but I'm afraid there's not too much Getty can do about it.

We all agreed to the EyeEm TOS when we uploaded there. Meaning: EyeEm has the right to distribute our content to their partners, like Getty for instance.
And to Getty, EyeEm is their contributor/partner, so they deal with them, or what's left of it. They don't have any business with EyeEym contributors.
Nobody of us knows the details of the deal between Getty and EyeEm, but I guess they just had to wait before things were legally official, and they acted rather quick on that.
I hope Adobe and other partners will follow.

What happened to EyeEm, and what companies like Wirestock are pulling off recently, should be a warning to all of us.
-> Don't upload to distributors. Keep control of your content for as much as you can.

And also: every now and then there's someone here who really does or shares something meaningful.
Robert did both, so thanks for that!

Thanks for the info, and taking the effort to actually go there and see what's going on.
Now we know for sure.

I'm still puzzled about what really happened.
EyeEm was sold last year to Talenthouse, which is also financially struggling and also not paying their contributors.
 
EyeEm was on the verge of going bankrupt already a year ago and Talenthouse was their last resort?
Or, Talenthouse bought a pretty decent company and sucked it out only to make their own balance look less worse.

Not that it matters that much, but it all sounds a bit fishy and crooked.

I also wonder what will happen with the partner collection.
Getty's EyeEm collection is still online, and still generating sales I assume: https://www.gettyimages.be/fotos/eyeem-collection

EDIT: just read the same question on Robert's blog.
Full EyeEm collection on Getty: https://www.gettyimages.be/fotos/eyeem

Quote from: eyewave on March 08, 2023, 03:31

Quote from: SVH on March 07, 2023, 16:27

You are getting a bit to emotional here and political as well. Totally unnecessary. The only point I'm making here is that if anyone with such a great audience place your art work it's worth thousands of dollars of promotion. Sure he doesn't pay for using your art but lot's of people will because he promoted your work and you will get a lot of attention of paying customers. And yes you can nag about things not being right but I personally would welcome something like this. And I will bet the artist in question will not be so unhappy as well. Even though she complains about not getting paid by Musk himself or being credited. C'mon think twice
But then still you can have another opinion. It's a free world still where we live, isn't it?

Can you tell me how in the world a microstock artist profits, when their work is stolen and published without mentioning the artist and linking to  their portfolio?

Let me try one last time

If you want to be succesful, with any product you sell, you have to reach a large audience. In that audience there are potential buyers. That is why we have advertisement on almost all media you use. You can make Coca Cola but if you don't tell people you have made this product nobody will buy your product.

So, if some lame ass with millions of followers tweets your photo then you get an enormous exposure.
In this audience you will have people that like this photo and will want to use it.
Among these people you have small players that might rip the photo of the tweet and use it and you get nothing. Not correct and a pity.

There will also be people that work for companies that have responsible policies and that obey the law of copyright. They will go and purchase the photo from the artist itself, or, in our case, from one of the agencies that sell our photo. Your photo will not be difficult to find and sales will be coming in.
Sales that never would have happened unless you would have spent a lot of money promoting your own work.

So that's why, even if it's fraudelent, wrong or whatever you want to call it, I (and again this is my personal opinion and you keep yours) would welcome any person that has millions of followers to expose my photo to his/her/it's audience, without them having bought the photo or credited me in the tweet.

Ask the artists in question if their revenues have gone up or down because of this. I am pretty sure that they will respond, if there are truthful, that it has gone up big time, even though they are whining about the wrongdoing.

edit:
So if this happens. You may want to sue the person, ask for a DMCA and get your photo as soon as possible of Twitter. I, on the other hand would let it stay there as long as possible. I might cause some trouble, to get even more exposure, but I would see it as a God given present.

It is your personal view on things, and that's fine, but it is irrelevant in this little controversy Musk created amongst photographers or creatives.

What you are saying is that some people can use your work for free and uncredited under certain conditions.
I can only hope for you that you still think that it's up to you to define the people or companies that may use your work for free and uncredited, and that you still would like to have something to say about the conditions in which they use it.

It's the old work-for-free-in-return-for-exposure-to-get-more-future-deals trick. And it surely can make sense. Careers were built on that.
But it's up to you to decide what you do or give away for free, and what you don't. Not the other way around.

So back to the initial discussion: you might not mind Musk using your content for free and uncredited. But others do, and their opinion is worth as much as yours, with the only difference being that they have the law on their side.

That's why people here are telling you that your opinion on the matter from a factual point of view doesn't make any sense.
You can still have it though, and as far as I'm concerned you can voice it as much as you want, but don't act surprised that they try to tell you in a convincing way that your point of view is factually wrong.

Quote from: Roscoe on March 02, 2023, 13:39

Maybe some stock agencies offer the possibility to exclude the use of your content in certain context... options here are very limited I guess.

I know that SS has an option (or at least used to) to exclude sexual and political content, but that's it. I don't know of any agency that would allow you to exclude usage for news or medical content.

I remember that too, not sure it's still an available option.
But if it is, it's useless as Shutterstock doesn't accept AI Generated content from their contributors.

Shutterstock will not allow AI-generated content to be submitted for sale on our platform. We want to ensure contributors can prove IP ownership of all submitted content and also want to be confident that artists are properly compensated if and when their work is used in AI training models. Given the availability of various AI content generation models in the marketplace, we are unable to verify the model source for most AI-generated content and therefore are unable to ensure all artists who were involved in the generation of each piece of content are compensated.

https://support.submit.shutterstock.com/s/article/Shutterstock-ai-and-Computer-Vision-Contributor-FAQ?language=en_US

Quote from: Roscoe on March 01, 2023, 15:51

Interesting points. I wonder how this is different than submitting an editorial image as commercial, or an image without model release, which the agency lets slip through? Who's responsible for the error? The contributor for having made an incorrect submission, or the agency for letting it slip through and offering it with wrong license terms?

I always thought that the contributor was still responsible in such cases.

Good question!
In this case I would say the author is resposable, because he does not own the copyright.

But you're still not considering the other side, the use of image:
Following your example, if I should put for commercial use something like, let's say, a well known and famous car...
The legal problem would eventually rise only and when the image would be used for commercial.
In other words, it's not the image that break the rules, it's the use of it that could do

Still trying to wrap my head around this.
I understand that there's a difference in having copyrights and terms of conditions.
Thanks for clarifying that.

I guess the latter, violating terms and conditions, would generally mean less trouble than violating copyright?
In the case of selling an AI Generated image that ends up in a political campaign... copyright is not the issue here, but terms and conditions might be? I mean: the contributor generated the image and made it possible to be used in a context that violates the terms and conditions of the AI Generative Tool?

Quote from: Roscoe on March 01, 2023, 03:40

Quote from: Uncle Pete on February 28, 2023, 12:38

Open AI would have to object and go to the user and then the agency and then back to the innocent artist. I wonder if the terms of use on Adobe and SSTK, for example, also say you can't use them for the above proposes that Open-AI doesn't allow? What if the images aren't marked created by AI or created by Open AI / DALL-E? Very complicated.

True, it's quite a chain a complaint would have to follow, but in the end, if it's a serious complaint, it will land on the contributor's desk. In most cases, chances are small anyone would really take the effort to sit it through I guess, but the problem with political campaigns for instance is that they have a high visibility and a potential debatable and polarizing exposure. We already had cases of political parties using editorial stock images pulled out of context for political campaigning. Media and independent journalists were very fast in identifying where the image came from and clarifying correct usage conditions.

Personally I'd like to steer away from any use of my content for certain use-cases like political campaigning for instance, but that option is not available when submitting content.
We cannot exclude certain context.

Again, not my field of expertise here, but to me, it sounds like the usage conditions for AI generated content by DALL-E or OpenAI are not in line with the usage conditions that stock agencies apply. Or they must have different usage conditions for AI generated content to their customers.

BINGO! 🔔 🔔 🔔

We are not responsible for the license terms, nor are we allowed to add conditions like the restrictions that Open-AI and others have placed on use for images we have created using their system.

Telling the person who wants to license images, that there are restrictions, is the duty of the agency.

No the complaint will not come back to the contributor. First off the person using the image, and then the agency, and then a slim possibility that someone from the AI company would try to chase down an artist. They would go for deep pockets first, not after the little that we have.

I don't know Pete. This is what's written in Adobe Stock's Generative AI requirements:

You must have all the necessary rights to submit generative AI illustrations to Adobe Stock for licensing and use as described in our contributor terms (e.g., broad commercial use).  You must review the terms of any generative AI tools that you use to confirm that this is the case before you submit any AI-generated content.

Do: Read the terms and conditions for generative AI tools that you use to ensure that you have the right to license all generative AI content that you submit to Adobe Stock under the contributor terms. For example, you cannot submit any content if you are not permitted to license it for commercial purposes.

Don�t: Use generative AI tools that are known or recognized as having serious flaws in their design or outputs (for example, tools which generate identifiable people or property from generic prompts).

Don�t: Submit works depicting real places, identifiable property (e.g., famous characters or logos), or notable people (whether photorealistic or - even caricatures)

So you must have the full rights to submit it for "broad commercial use".
I assume (again, not my fleld of expertise) that this also means: political campaigning or other contexts which are excluded from DALL-E or OpenAI's terms of conditions.

So I see that as a responsibility of the contributor: make sure you have the full rights before submitting.

Admittedly, agencies are on the lazy side here as they can easily identify AI generated content, and they can apply different customer terms on them if they would want to. And they can whitelist certain AI Generative Tools which terms are in line with the agencies terms.

It all sounds like a theoretical discussion and complaints in this area feel like a rather unlikely event to happen, but it's not impossible either. Remember Alex and his news stand images receiving a complaint via Alamy.

DALL-E could be use for Adobe Stock or another agency? 
i only see this about.
https://platform.openai.com/docs/usage-policies/disallowed-usage

Not my field of expertise, but I guess it can get you, theoretically, in trouble.

You generate an AI image, submit it to Adobe Stock, where it finds it's way to a customer who uses it for political campaigning.
Sure, how the image is used is beyond your control as you cannot specify the usage conditions or context, but it's still an image that you generated via OpenAI and your responsibility to make sure it's usage is not in violation with the openAI policies?

Since the email is out, slack is for me not able to reach anymore.
I guess they select the most critical persons not to critic anymore or just closed slack for all, because now also the last prayers for Wirestock will search alternatives.
I'm very disappointed, but not really surprised about their decision.
I'm pretty sure it is the nail to go bankrott in less than a year from now.

Yes, they also communicated the shutdown of their Slack channels yesterday... on Slack.
They mentioned to be working on another way to have direct contact with contributors, but did not went into detail.

Too bad. It's one of the few things they did well. They had direct contact with their contributor base, which provided them very helpful feedback, mainly in reporting bugs and errors. I was not a very frequent visitor there, but from what I saw, it was a constructive and positive community. So I really wonder why on earth they decided to shut it down.

Wirestock lost me a year ago, and they didn't really improve since then. 
They don't seem to review content anymore (lots of complaints), and the content that was reviewed has an uncertain status.
Will they submit it? Nobody knows. To where? Unclear.
To which bottom of the barrel future agency? Hope for the best. (they seem to automatically submit all your content to new agencies they onboard, it happened with Getty for my content and I don't like what they did with "Extra Channels")
When will their front-end be free of bugs? Never, probably.

They still have the potential to be  useful, even with the 300 images/video's cap, but as things stand now... even if you're only half-serious on submitting to stock agencies, you're better off with maintaining your personal accounts.

You could try selling it as editorial, without a release form. I would consider an airshow to be good editorial content.

But even then, you'll need approval from the organizer?
I always thought that everything that's subject to entry fees/entry tickets is not suitable for editorial content without approval of the organizer.

Think music festivals, museums, airlines, and also airshows.

Yet I see a lot of editorial content from activities that require entry fees or tickets to get in.
So either I'm wrong, or the contributors take the risk (and are getting away with it)

Contributing to EyeEm is absolutely something to avoid. The issues started last year around May, after they were acquired by Talenthouse.
Contributors got paid eventually somewhere around July/August if I'm not mistaken, but most of us didn't see any payment since then.

EyeEm also stopped reporting the Getty sales? I saw a few Adobe sales coming in, but no Getty sales anymore since December or so.

If I could get my content removed from their partner collections I would be happy to do so, but the frustration and hassle of dealing with unresponsive and otherwise very bureaucratic support is somehow holding me back to start climbing that mountain. Not worth it to let it mess up my mood, not worth it for the few 100 images I have there that only bring in lunch money every month.

Anyhow, be warned, don't upload to EyeEm (anymore).

Quote from: Dimaximus on January 05, 2023, 10:18

the rating was 1500-2000, after unlocking for 1 week the rating was 18 800....

Where can I see my rating ?

in the dashboard, select "Lifetime" in the timeframe drop-down box in the left upper corner.
You can also check your position for "this week"

The latest e-mail from SS has: "The Contributor Fund will release earnings every 6 months"
If that's all we get for 6 months of usage, it is very underwhelming.

Really? It's a 6 months thing? Very underwhelming indeed.
Feels like iStock/Getty connect.

This is interesting:

On my computer I still have the old dashboard, on the pad it's the new one now.
I find the old dashboard better because I can see immediately which images were bought last. With the new dashboard, I need more clicks.

Same here. One computer has the old dashboard, the other one displays the new.
Might be a cookies thing.