Quote from: zager on June 22, 2011, 02:06

Quote from: cclapper on June 21, 2011, 18:47

I think that if a "fair trade commission" is going to be founded to provide honesty and transparency to buyers, contributors and agencies, a simple answer like "political issues" isn't going to fly. Who was responsible for stripping out the copyright? Someone has to know, but no one wants to claim responsibility. What has been done since to remedy that situation? Apparently nothing, because just 2-3 weeks ago, my images were on a partner site with copyright info stripped out. Nobody's talking. Nothing has changed.

Please, look into history of MSG forum, Shutterstock's forum and our blog before you say this about Pixmac.

Please read the last line of my post.

Also, I have read the forums. I read them ALL as they were happening. Shortly after it happened, threads were locked and no one wanted to speak about it. I as a contributor still have not gotten a full detailed email report of exactly what happened from any of the agencies involved, and all of my images were affected. I can guess, based on what other contributors have said and have found out, but no official word from the actual agencies. I hear you saying "political issues". That doesn't answer my questions (see my post above).

Each and every contributor affected should have gotten a detailed email, outlining exactly who, what, when and why it happened, and what has been done to correct the problem.

It's amusing to me how megastock mentioned the fact that the agencies that have signed have not corrected the stripping of metatdata issue yet, and you thank them for their valuable input. I said the same thing, except I throw in the pixmac name, and you try to make me look like I don't know what I'm talking about.  How could you sign, pledging something, that you yourself have just admitted a post or two ago has not been corrected yet and is still in progress?

The Fair Trade Agency "seal of approval" already means nothing.

Very good point - if something serious happened, it would at least help if contributors were told what it was rather than being treated like mushrooms.

There seems to be a lot of confusion about the purpose of DCMA takedown notices - the aim is to get third parties such as web hosts to take down your images, not as a remedy against the person who has stolen the images themselves.

For example - userX posts your image on flickr. You send the DCMA notice to flickr to take down the images. If you know who userX is, you can sue them for stealing your work. If userx has their own website userx.com, you send the DCMA notice to their web host to take down the content. If flickr or the webhost don't do it, they themselves risk becoming liable for the copyright infringement.

Getty sending letters of demand when they find a culprit is absolutely the correct way of enforcing copyright. In some cases people have a legitimate way of getting around copyright violations - for example they paid a web developer to build a site for them, the web developer stole the images without the knowledge or consent of the client - but in that case the web developer is still liable for the copyright breach, and can be sued themselves and the website owner still needs to pull down the images. If someone gets caught out without a valid excuse or defence, then paying up is probably the best thing they can do, (or hope that they're too small a fish for someone to worry about frying).

Basically you should be sending DCMA notices to Google, Yahoo, Webhosts, etc. Letters of demand for damages for past copyright violation and takedown notices to anyone who is actually stealing your work. If you do this, remember to document violations with screenshots etc & probably include them in any correspondence.

To me this tool seems to be a way of making it much easier to track down violations of copyright, and should see an increase of legitimate uses, rather than the opposite.  Lets see how it pans out.

Luis. Not sure where you get your numbers but they are absolutely wrong. See here

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/cutcaster.com/

and here

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/cutcaster.com

Does that look dead to you, Luis?

My suggestion, Add some links to your Cutcaster portfolio in your signature on this forum and you will get more sales. Let me know when you added a link.

Sorry but clicking through the Alexa long term stats just shows that you're getting more people finding the site on search and bouncing off - you've gone from a 20% bounce rate to 60% since the start of the year, I'd hardly consider that a roaring success. Put a better-performing site on the chart - say another one of the low earners like bigstock - and cutcaster disappears without a trace.

Maybe you could share some actual insights on how you're planning to turn the ship around? Are you advertising for buyers anywhere these days?

Quote from: holgs on June 13, 2011, 04:46

As far as the content of the edstock portfolio goes, there are more product and location type shots that don't require any special sort of permission than I'd like, but there is also some great content that adds value to the collection and wouldn't really be available through regular contributors. Try this image for example: http://www.istockphoto.com/stock-photo-16844219-king-bhumibol-adulyadej-of-thailand-celebrates-82nd-birthday.php?st=6ec82ef

Not sure if anyone has tried to get access to the King of Thailand for a photo shoot lately, but its not something that is easy. While I was there, he did a trip in public along the river in a boat. They basically lined the river with police to make sure you A. couldn't get a vantage point on bridges etc at a higher elevation than the king, B. couldn't take photos while he was actually passing.

Therefore if I was the lucky person to be granted access, I wouldn't be happy about the photo going for micro prices, especially as the number of sales of the photo is likely to be low. It's a 'niche' photo and should be sold for a 'niche' price.

Presumably the photo was sold for its niche value initially, now 2 years later they want to revive its earnings potential that the volumes from iStock may or may not bring. If I had one of the only images like this for sale online at the iStock E+ price-point of $5-30, I don't think I'd be overly upset. I don't think the image has such a low sales potential - assuming they add the keyword "King" I'd be very surprised if it doesn't get lots of sales.

Maybe if IStock got something right, there may be more for it's contributers to be positive about. LOL... even the grown admin over there acknowledges that:

"There are clearly some bones to pick about the following:

1. Keywords
2. Titles
3. Apparent quality
4. Placement in search
5. Content flowing quicker to iStock than it's flowing to the Partner Program sites and Getty
"

Was there anything else even involved in this rollout? Not that I can see... they literally managed to F everything up. Maybe that's why all the negativity. Just a theory.

I think there is a little bit of an obsession on focusing on the negative things that happen at iStock and the views expressed here are far from balanced at the moment. I don't think the overall trend at iStock is as bad as its being made out to be here. For me the overwhelming positive at iStock is that they're having success at pushing a greater variety of pricepoints - obviously this is more evident as an exclusive.

As far as the content of the edstock portfolio goes, there are more product and location type shots that don't require any special sort of permission than I'd like, but there is also some great content that adds value to the collection and wouldn't really be available through regular contributors. Try this image for example: http://www.istockphoto.com/stock-photo-16844219-king-bhumibol-adulyadej-of-thailand-celebrates-82nd-birthday.php?st=6ec82ef

Not sure if anyone has tried to get access to the King of Thailand for a photo shoot lately, but its not something that is easy. While I was there, he did a trip in public along the river in a boat. They basically lined the river with police to make sure you A. couldn't get a vantage point on bridges etc at a higher elevation than the king, B. couldn't take photos while he was actually passing.

To me there is a pretty decent set of political figures and celebrities including some notable examples that aren't in other collections.

Quote from: sjlocke on June 08, 2011, 15:51

Quote from: SNP on June 08, 2011, 15:33

how are everyone's sales today? my sales are almost non-existent. like a Saturday today. not sure what's up. but they're so bad that I figure something weird happened today.

Not so great this week and today, even less so, relatively speaking.

mine were the same last week. then they picked up to normal again, but today--worse day in years. old files. very strange.

My sales seem to be following the pattern you're talking about. Yesterday was good, today looks pretty bad, but not at weekend levels...

BME for me on IS in terms of $$$ DL numbers are also the highest they've been for a long time.

Lets see what the summer brings....

Quote from: holgs on May 30, 2011, 04:29

Yeah best not to travel anywhere. Its expensive and full of killers just waiting for you to turn up with things they can rob.

Traveled in more than 50 countries so far and still alive, thanks.

If that's true then it makes your comments about the people who would kill you for your DSLR in Peru, Brazil or Colombia even sadder.

I'm planning a European trip next month (3 weeks). Will be in Italy, France, Germany and Switzerland. Is it worth taking city scapes and "travel" style photos for microstock (wondering if I should bring my 5d Mark II along). My North American travel photos don't sell that well so I am considering just bringing a point and shoot for the memories...

Traveling for photography & traveling for vacation are very different experiences. The travel style photos which sell usually don't just happen, they're planned around times that usually don't coincide with usual holiday activities such as sleeping in or going out for drinks in the evenings. As others have said, if theft is a worry, just get insurance.

Racephoto - the point of that court ruling appears to be that Bridgeman owns the bit of paper that they copy the image onto, but that doesn't give them any rights over the image itself. If you copy the image off their bit of paper, you aren't taking anything that belongs to them so they have no right to complain. That seems to make a lot of sense and I think it is making an unjustified and irrational leap to claim that the only reason the judge ruled as he did was because one side had a better lawyer than the other. Couldn't it equally well be that the law is clear and the judge ruled correctly?
Secondly, is there case-law in the US? If so, isn't this a legal precedent for any future cases?

Your example seems to be flawed to me in that it fails to distinguish between property rights and intellectual property rights. If I give someone a photo I've taken, then they own that photo. If they scan my photo it doesn't give them rights to the reproduction of that image, they can't take my rights away from me. Why should absence of copyright mean that somebody can seize the copyright simply by making a scan, if they can't do that when there is an existing copyright?

So, logically, the idea of turning public domain material into copyrighted material simply by scanning it doesn't make sense. Of course, the legal position may have nothing to do with logic or sense but the actual court ruling suggests that it does.

It may be that you are wrong about copying out-of-copyright films, too. Film copyright would be very complicated - who is the author? Is it the company? If a company is a person in law and copyright expires 70 years after the death of the author, then as long as the company is legally alive the countdown won't even start, will it? I don't know. The copyright extensions Hollywood presses for could have more to do with the ownership of characters, such as Mickey Mouse, which have an identified mortal creator and continuing value in the creation of new products, than with copyright over films which are collaborative, company funded creations.

So there are some thoughts but, of course, the law is a minefield even for those who make a living from it, let alone the rest of us.

I think you sum it up pretty well.

The case is a US authority which technically is binding in New York, but seems to have been followed in other states. Its influential for the UK as well because it comments on UK copyright law without determining the case on that basis. Being a US case it isn't of course binding in the UK.

I think one of the reasons a similar case hasn't been brought in the UK is that museums or archives like Bridgeman stand to loose far more than any potential gain if they don't win.

For practical purposes, the case doesn't mean you can't sell scans or whatever of public domain material, just that if someone decided to copy those images rather than buying them, theres not much you can do about it.

Quote from: holgs on May 13, 2011, 14:34

If all you're doing is fixing the old images - that is not manipulating them so that the content is different - then you don't have copyright over the changes because you're not creating an original work: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_v._Corel_Corp.

The fact of public domain works being for sale in many agencies doesn't mean that the person selling the images has any claim to copyright over those images or any remedy for another person using a copy of those images that end up on a website somewhere.

That's fascinating, because when iStock included the Bridgeman library in its collection it maintained it could do so because Bridgeman owned the material the copies had been made on, therefore it had copyright on the images. Furthermore, it claimed that nobody could submit identical works because they might be infringing Bridgeman copyright, even if they had been copied from another source (e.g. scans from an old book). So it seems that Getty, Bridgeman and iStock do not accept the authority of that court ruling.

Technically, the ruling would seem to mean that you can't click the "I own the copyright" boxes on any of the sites. And that would also seem to apply to all the rip-off NASA public domain space images unless they have undergone considerable additional work.

Whether they accept it or not, Bridgeman lost the case and presumably had to pay the costs of the case. In a practical sense, they still own and have physical possession of the scans and for many purposes are probably the best source of those scans for anyone wanting a high quality image, even if the copyright is in the public domain.

Another BME for me in overall $$$ (IS exclusive) despite only adding a handful of images this month.