I just sent Envato a support ticket asking them if they were planning to issue US 1099s for the 2015 tax year, and if so, were they planning to use the fictional earnings number on the invoices versus the actual amounts we get get paid. I noted that I'd have to leave PhotoDune if they were planning to do this as the tax hassle wasn't worth the income.

If they don't plan to issue 1099s, I can continue as I have been, reporting the income they actually pay me.

I understand that the odds of any court anywhere upholding this creative writing assignment they call an invoice are close to zero, but I have no interest in spending time or money litigating this nonsense.

The originals noted above are from multiple portfolios - I'm confused about which ones are the work of the OP and which aren't.

I looked at the key in the shining key images wondering if the copycat had been lazy enough to use someone else's stock image (the key has a pretty distinctive design) but there are several isolated shots of  that "antique" key on Shutterstock, so I assume it's a fairly common item.

Lots of composite images (all the CCTV cameras) but although it's the same camera photoshopped on, there's no indication it's someone else's camera (and I didn't check all the background shots, but at least some are from the copycat's own portfolio).

There are masses of near duplicates in the copycat's portfolio - same background with a few changed words - I can't see how any more than a handful got accepted, but that's another story. The icons, recycle symbols and such are all pretty generic, so I doubt there's any direct evidence there of misuse of someone else's work.

As far as the copying a concept issue, he seems to be spreading the love around and copying multiple concept setups from multiple contributors. I think that behavior would merit a warning to stop it and produce something more original if I were running the agency, but I don't think it qualifies for a DMCA takedown or copyright infringement, irritating as it is.

What Mike said, plus it's $249 a month if you just buy one month (you have to commit to a year to get $199 a month) and only some contributors get 38 cents a download - it starts at 25 cents and increases as your earnings do.

Not every contributor makes it to the top earnings level (it's been a while since the sites had the stats that would let us see this, but the pyramid of contributors by portfolio size was very wide at the bottom, and similarly with total downloads per contributor; it could have changed over the last few years, but I doubt it).

Also, the downloads are 25 a day, so if you're a corporate user and you don't go in on Saturday and Sunday you've lost those 50 downloads - about 200 downloads fewer than the nominal maximum in a typical month. If you make a stab at the average sub download royalty at 32 cents x 550 downloads (750 - 200) that's $176 and SS keeps $73, about 30% of the gross.

I'd bet few subscribers download even 550 a month

I am confused as to the merchandizing, isn't that a good thing?

Depends on what it is. And we don't know, but the notion that as the contributor I would have no control over whatever that was - links to other Getty properties, ads like in a Google search - is largely the source of my concern.

You're thinking that this would be something merchandising your work and increasing your income - and that would be excellent, but I'm not sure why it would need removal of other things - like description - to make it happen.

Looks clean and the larger zoom is very welcome. I find the most odd part of this the removal of visibility of descriptions.

For some images, they don't matter, but for others, I guess the buyer has to look at the list of keywords to find out the exact location, species, etc. Seems not to be customer friendly to make it hard to read the important info for those types of images where it's important.

So losing "beautiful girl twirls in the sunshine" is irrelevant, but "Palm Beach, Aruba, looking north toward Malmok Beach" conveys something a buyer might not be able to discern from the image

Losing the file sizes suggests they're really dug in on this one size idea. And the idea of additional "merchandising" on the page in the future would bother me if I had more than a handful of images left there.

The language is so ickily corporate-speak: "Please note additional content merchandising will be built out on this platform in the future.", and calling it an Asset Detail Page - our images, illustrations, video & audio are all just assets to Getty...

I grew up with a quaint expression "Don't teach your grandmother to suck eggs". Can't enlighten you on the origin, but in general it was used to warn people who knew a little or nothing that they shouldn't lecture people who knew a lot more than they did.

You admit you're new. You don't post links to your portfolio - care to share a bit versus just criticize?

Some people here are anonymous, and to spare you some negative talk, I'll let you go look up why that is in the many threads here about this. As you're new, perhaps you didn't know you could put information into your forum profile to allow links to your portfolio to show up - it lets people get to know you a  bit.

The forums here are a meeting place for a worldwide group of freelancers to compare notes about what's going on with the business. Some threads dissolve into slug fests and those are best ignored unless you like such things. The tone of the posts generally reflects what's going on. When we were fighting back against some agency shenanigans (search for Dollar Photo Club and Fotolia and boycott, or Deposit Photos and Shotshop; you'll see many examples) the tone was negative but contstructive.

Count yourself both lucky and unlucky that you haven't been around to understand why people here are in the mood they are. But turning this into a happy talk water cooler wouldn't serve any useful purpose for me. Generally people read and learn before they start telling everyone else how they ought to conduct themselves. No idea how you intended it to come off, but I find it pretty rude.

It's a marginally softer approach to the "we're in control and you have no say other than to leave" message that Getty sent when it changed the contract to say that they could decide what sold as RM, RF or for subscriptions (which was a big sticking point for some, having their work moved to Thinkstock).

Alamy says they can delete the image; Getty said you could leave if you didn't like what they did. Both are making clear who's in the driver's seat (according to them).

It'd be so delightful to see someone with a large, lucrative portfolio just leave the agency in such cases - in theory this game of chicken could be played either way - but of course there's too much at stake, people have to eat and so the agency gets what it wants.

I know, it's just business...

I don't know where they are in the submissions backlog, but they haven't yet reached October 4th (my oldest pending file)!

I continue to see sales, although February is a bit Valentine's heavy and I have very few for that season on Canva, so I wouldn't expect anything like a BME. Don't forget the typical seasonal ups and downs will affect new agencies too.

They promote 74 sites with free images! Who will buy our content if they can get what they need for free???

Canva itself has some free images, and I think that's a smart idea - people can try some things out without spending any money, but if they get into this for real, then they purchase images for many/most projects. Having some free images to do test designs removes a barrier to getting people started.

Clearly the free images aren't enough or those of us who sell there would not be getting paid (and we are).

I would have preferred it if the blog post made some brief mention of (a) the paid images on Canva being very reasonably priced and (b) when you might choose to pay for an image vs. use a free one. Leaving those topics out made it seem more like a promo for freebies than a useful article pointing out options.

Honest question, also related to PixelByte's comment, why is it allowed to copy a photograph but not copy a vector?

It isn't.

Back when iStock was really an agency (before Getty destroyed it), they had an image of the week that it later turned out was a re-shot and re-posed almost-duplicate of something a different photographer had created. Not only did they replace the image of the week, but I think they closed the contributor's account.

There was a lawsuit over a shot of a red double decker bus that a cheap client wouldn't pay the original photographer for, where the copy (not identical shot but same concept) that the cheap client had made was held to infringe the original photographer's copyright.

http://lawclanger.blogspot.com/2012/02/photographer-of-westminster-omnibus.html

But if you do just the smallest amount of work, you can create something from scratch on your own to try and gather up some sales of popular works - and lots of the top sellers in microstock have done that with some themes and setups that have been used by many other photographers over the years. It isn't copying but it obviously upsets those who were previously selling like crazy and see reduced sales.

This is one situation where the right models can help - if the image depends upon the wonderful expressions/face/poses of a particular model, it's harder to recreate for those who want to do that.

It is because of buyer fee scam.

I know it is, but that doesn't make the reports any more clear.

If I were really the seller, my "invoice" would show all the deductions from what the buyer paid -  list price [minus] buyer fee [ minus] author fee [equals] what I actually receive from them. 64% in "fees" is pretty outrageous for a platform, IMO.

I wonder what the chances are that they'll come to their senses and drop this insane fiction now they've actually implemented it?

I know this is an old thread, but I received a reply from support this morning

They basically said that they shouldn't have sold the additional licenses because the files were deactivated at the point that happened. They said they do audit for this before doing deals, but somehow messed up this time. They did pay me and as long as it doesn't happen again, I'll just accept their apology for a mistake - if they would have argued that it was OK to do this and might do it again in the future, I'd continue the discussion.

Here's their words for the above:

"Thanks for your patience while we investigated. It does appear that the assets were in fact deactivated at the time of this invoice. I have confirmed that license adjustments should not occur for files that had been deactivated and that we do audit content prior to these negotiations to ensure that the files are still active. It seems that we did not catch your deactivated file(s) on the audit we did and for that we apologize. The royalties have have been deposited to your account. "

Why stockfresh is actually not so successful? I read here in the forum a long time ago. Thought that might be more successful. Is not that an alleged by photographer page or something?

The guy who started Stockfresh is one of the founders of StockXpert (and the free site that was stock.xhchg and is now freeimages.com and owned by Getty). StockXpert started a little later than iStock and Shutterstock, but grew pretty well and quickly. It was acquired by Jupiter and then swallowed up by Getty when they bought Jupiter.

The story was that when Stockfresh got to a million images they'd start investing in marketing. They reached that years ago and then didn't do any marketing that I'm aware of. Then there was talk of being patient. My portfolio is there but I don't upload any more.

My best guess is that what was enough to get StockXpert off the ground in 2005 wasn't enough to get Stockfresh into the running in 2010 - lots had changed. No one wants to make a big investment, apparently, so the site languishes.

The new design is nice, but that's not the problem with sales at Stockfresh, so I don't expect it will have any effect at all.