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Messages - michaeldb
Pages: 1 ... 9 10 11 12 13 [14] 15 16 17 18 19 ... 37
326
« on: June 05, 2012, 12:03 »
RE: What planet are you on?
One where I do my research before I talk about a topic, you should join me....
Research this: "Pinterest might be the most illegal network to hit the Internet yet. More illegal than Napster. More illegal than Megaupload."
"...Media law attorney Itai Maytal, who's an associate at Miller Korzenik Sommers LLP, 'In its terms of use, Pinterest actually specifies that users shouldn't pin photos they don't own the rights to, a request that is being ignored to an absurd degree. Even if you link and attribute, that does NOT absolve you of the fact that you took someone else's work and re-appropriated it.'"http://articles.businessinsider.com/2012-02-17/tech/31070312_1_copyright-holder-napster-youtubeHelping Pinterest destroy copyright because you get a little SEO bump, whether it's real or not, is like helping an invader destroy your country because sometimes they give you free candy.
327
« on: June 05, 2012, 11:55 »
I think it's going to be very hard to make the switch now. The other sites have become stricter with reviews than they were a few years ago. Getting sales going can take a long time for new contributors.
Good point. And because of that eventually the selling of stock images will come down to a battle between two sides:
-Getty (and IS and its exclusives)
-independents at SS, DT, and the others
It is why I have stopped submitting to IS and have been removing image from there, even if it costs me money. We are making a mistake by feeding the hand that beats us.
Getty would love to have a monopoly of the RF image business and could achieve that. If it does, we independents will be out of business.
328
« on: June 04, 2012, 20:24 »
Not a clue what wasn't elaborate enough.
I have had rejections of my illustrations as 'too simple'. It is sort of the opposite of the scene in Amadeus where the emperor criticizes one of Mozart's concertos for having 'too many notes'. So I go back and add more lines, and some stars and rainbows. It is pretty obvious what the 'not elaborate enough' rejection means for photos: For example, if your photo is of a house, you may need to add more houses. Hire a construction company if necessary. If the photo is of a person, does the person have just one nose? Consider adding more noses to make the photo sufficiently elaborate. Five or six eyes is obviously more elaborate and therefore better than just a couple of them. If the rejected photo was a skyscape, travel to a country where there are more clouds, or better yet, a planet where the solar system has more than one sun. An added benefit of such a trip is that the aliens in these star systems may have several noses and dozens of eyes, making for sufficient elaborateness in you people shots.
329
« on: June 02, 2012, 12:14 »
Some of these sites will end up being worth millions or billions of dollars and it's appalling that they aren't paying anything for the copyright infringements on their sites.
This is the real problem. Not SEO or getting a quick cheap bump in Google Image search. It's about us losing our right to get paid for what we do. "Pinterest might be the most illegal network to hit the Internet yet. More illegal than Napster. More illegal than Megaupload." Business Insiderhttp://articles.businessinsider.com/2012-02-17/tech/31070312_1_copyright-holder-napster-youtubePinterest is pirates - they are part of a large and growing effort to get rid of copyright entirely. And the more money they get, the more they effectively will attack copyright itself. And so far they are winning. We can't afford to help them.
330
« on: May 28, 2012, 19:38 »
...Is it too late to change the habits of billions of internet users?...
yes i think it's too late ...
go tell them they have to pay, and good luck ... thanks god stock photos are not in such a bad situation, yet, but never say never...next step can be pretty well a flickr clone with millions of stolen stock images from the best agencies, hosted in china, refusing to take down anything, and hosting full-res unwatermarked keyworded photos ... that would be the end of the road for stock and it could be just a matter of time ! 
Yes, the public thinks (or wants to think) that everything digital is free. The reason why microstockers get paid is because our customers are not the public, but rather businesses (if some are very, very small businesses). Business people are afraid of being sued (and are much more likely to be sued than an individual). And the businesses which themselves sell digital content understand that they have to play ball and pay up if they want to play in the game and get paid. That's why copyright law has penalties for lawbreakers, and why SOPA and other punitive efforts are important. People will only pay when they are afraid of getting into trouble if they don't pay.
331
« on: May 26, 2012, 17:29 »
"20 B2B Marketers Losing their Brand on Pinterest" February 21, 2012 http://b2bdigital.net/2012/02/21/b2b-marketers-pinterest/ Some Pinterest pirates are hijacking the logos and brands of companies such as Sprint, FedEx, and Intel. Many of these Pinterest pages have pins linking to pages which are selling products on other sites. Because Pinterest is already making money from some referral fees, Pinterest may get profit from these pinboard pages in the future. What will DT do if I start one of these pages under the name 'Dreamstime' and with Dreamstime's logo, and I pin whatever I choose on that page and find a way to monetize it for my own profit? I guess DT will just say, "Oh well, it's social media, they can do whatever they want."
332
« on: May 26, 2012, 16:19 »
Good point. Maybe we should flood DT with images with pinterest logo and find out. Though I'm pretty sure of what the outcome will be. 
"Pinterest might be the most illegal network to hit the Internet yet. More illegal than Napster. More illegal than Megaupload.
...Media law attorney Itai Maytal, who's an associate at Miller Korzenik Sommers LLP, 'In its terms of use, Pinterest actually specifies that users shouldn't pin photos they don't own the rights to, a request that is being ignored to an absurd degree. Even if you link and attribute, that does NOT absolve you of the fact that you took someone else's work and re-appropriated it.'"Business Insider Kevin Lincoln|February 17, 2012 http://articles.businessinsider.com/2012-02-17/tech/31070312_1_copyright-holder-napster-youtube
333
« on: May 26, 2012, 15:53 »
I posted this question on DT: "If I submit here an image which includes the Pinterest logo, will DT reject it for IP infringement? If so, why are the IP rights of Ben Silbermann (owner of Pinterest) protected by DT and mine are not?"
Can I start a website and call it mikes-pinterest.com and use the Pinterest logo on it? If I do Ben Silbermann, will sue me to protect his Intellectual Property rights. Why are his Intellectual Property rights protected but he can infringe on mine?
It has been asked, what can we do about this? At least we can complain in every public venue that we have access to that it is wrong and unfair.
334
« on: May 25, 2012, 21:14 »
How can meaningful pressure be brought against Pinterest?
Good question, I wish I knew the answer. You are right that big momentum is with social media now, this was Serban's main argument in the DT thread about Pinterest: you can't resist going along with it. A news article I saw today said that the majority of DMCA notices sent to infringers are not artists or musicians but are sent by Microsoft against sites giving away Windows. But it seems that even with MS's resources they are fighting a losing battle. Maybe one thing we can do is just to not go along with it. When 'freetards' post anti-copyright propaganda here and in other sites, we should take the time to post opposing arguments. It's a grassroots thing. Refute the idea some people have that Google is a non-profit and Brin and Page's sole purpose in life is to do no evil and make the internet safe for hippies and nerds. And that SOPA was an evil right wing conspiracy. How did Google, Facebook, Pinterest et al get so much momentum? A lot of it was grassroots-type PR. People posting in forums and writing in blogs, and tweeting. We should take every opportunity to make it clear that it is not fair to use our work to make money and not pay us anything. Maybe doing that will help, at least a little.
335
« on: May 25, 2012, 19:54 »
At some point the pendulum will start swinging back. People still understand compensation for creative work - they just pretend they don't, because the Internet is still new, still a magic place where the old rules don't apply and everything is free. Once the internet becomes really, truly commonplace - just a medium, accessed by appliances - old social contracts will reassert themselves.
Please forgive me if that sounds to me like whistling in the dark. To paraphrase the Godfather, if history has taught us anything it is that rights once lost are difficult to get back. Especially if the usurpers have enough money to buy congressmen, judges, the even whole legislatures (the Polish government reversed itself on copyright protection when it figured out that Poles were making more money from piracy than from selling copyright licenses). The Pirate Party is now getting a significant percentage of votes in German elections. It seems to me that working to keep our legal rights is a better plan than letting them be lost and hoping that someday somehow "old social contracts will reassert themselves".
336
« on: May 25, 2012, 18:49 »
"...when we say Pinterest is "hosting" we mean it makes illegal copies of copyrighted material, and then lets other people use those copies any way they want.
From Google on down, corporations are using the safe harbor provision of the DMCA as a license to steal. The more they weaken copyright, the more billions in profit they make. Google's business model is essentially that of a magazine. It provides access to the works of writers and artists and makes money by selling ads. Except that magazines pay the writers and artists. Musicians, film-makers, authors (who sued Google for massive copyright infringement), and now artists and photographers seem to be fighting a losing battle against Google and the social media sites. Copyright is being deprecated on the internet, and we are heading toward a world where - for the first time since the mid-1700s - people who create original works will not get paid for what they do. Note though that Google and the other corporations which sactimoniously opposed SOPA are very quick to sue to protect their (questionable) software patents.
337
« on: May 25, 2012, 16:15 »
May: 4 ELs, 1 $75 SOD
April: 3 ELs
March: 8 ELs
Feb: 3 ELs
338
« on: May 22, 2012, 17:53 »
That is cool.
I respect that.
+1
+2 And I doubt that it will hurt his revenues at all. Granted, I am no Yuri, but as I have posted before, since I stopped submitting to IS my rate of revenue growth has actually increased. I think that you microstockers who are afraid to stop submitting to the Dark Side just because of potential revenue fall-off are wrong. I have absolutely no doubt that customers will find Yuri's images, or yours, on other sites.
339
« on: May 22, 2012, 17:43 »
I guess only we microstockers could see:
-big investors wanting to invest in microstock
-big investment banks eager do IPOs for microstock companies
and think it is a bad sign for microstock.
We all worry about the future of our business and think about having alternative sources of income. I know I do. So maybe it is a good thing to see that some professional financiers are optimistic about the future of microstock (even if we don't necessarily trust those guys).
340
« on: May 21, 2012, 15:59 »
"I just received a rejection from Dreamstime requesting I remove the text (on a white BG) from several images..."
The DT reviewers seem to now be injecting their own strange opinions into the review process. I recently had a vector image rejected because it wasn't 'tileable'. That is, it wasn't usable as a pattern.
1. It wasn't intended to be a pattern.
2. Approximately 99.9% of the images on DT are not tileable, and yet were accepted.
3. It was accepted by every other stock agency.
I doubt if 'no text in an image' is a new DT policy (I certainly hope not). It is probably just another example of DT's decline in reviewer quality. They need to fix that.
341
« on: May 21, 2012, 15:50 »
These hype IPOs are a farse. They serve only one purpose: to line the pocket of financial executives and a few insiders managing the IPO. It's not about investment, it's about fees.... they have almost nothing to do with the company's or the investors interest. If there was rational price discovery mechanism at work here, the shares simply wouldn't sell at such an unreal price compared to working profits... and it wouldn't generate so much fee.
The Facebook IPO is the daddy of all farces. As I mentioned in another thread Apple, with all it's fantastic products and $100B of cash reserves, is currently trading at a price/earnings ratio of about 13. Google has a PE of 20. Facebook's earnings ratio is a staggering ... wait for it ... are you sitting down ... 125!!!!!! In other words, it's only going to take about 125 years for Facebook to eventually earn what it was priced at.
Boy you7 sure know it L
So there was a dotcom bubble, it popped, disaster - they went from that to an enormous real estate bubble, popped, disaster - now they want another dotcom bubble? 0.o Talk about quick, forced loss of memories.... or learning from mistakes.. omg 
Boy, you sure know it all................
The posts of Drugal continue to serve as a reminder to us all of the purpose and value of the MSG Ignore option.
342
« on: May 19, 2012, 14:50 »
The Tao of Shutterstock: What Makes a Stock Photo a Stock Photo? - The Atlantic
For years, whenever any book or mainstream publication said anything about microstock or 'crowdsourcing' images, they only talked about iStock or mentioned other agencies only as an afterthought. Nice to see that changing.
343
« on: May 18, 2012, 17:21 »
By the way, I have complained on the DT forums. Achilles has jumped in. Here's the thread:
http://www.dreamstime.com/thread_31459
I am hoping that some of you fellow contributors who express yourselves way more eloquently than I will help out with getting an opt out or having the Share button removed from our images.
I am not convinced at all that people pinning images from DT or any other site or posting to FB are translating into whopping sales for us contributors. I think the same people who are using these images are the same ones who think that anything on the internet is free for their taking.
I followed your post ... and the response -- or, should I say, "The Spin?" 
Achilles made some good points. He is concerned that social media is such a powerful trend that he ignores it at his peril, and he is probably right. He can't afford to fail to use promotional media that Getty is exploiting. However, I think we should try to hold the microstock agencies' feet to the fire on this. More and more, it looks like the social media sites and Google are mounting a broad and very real attack on copyright itself (look at the posts of the troll who joined here just to attack us today, look at the Pirate party in the German legislature, and the way that the Polish gov voted to support the pirates). We have a lot to lose if they win.
344
« on: May 18, 2012, 16:33 »
...ever since then my cat will occasionally shake her head as if she has something in her ear...
I'm no vet but having had cats with ear mites I would think that if your cat is not rubbing her ears with her paws she probably doesn't have the bugs. Maybe she is just shaking her head because she is exasperated; I do that sometimes.
345
« on: May 18, 2012, 14:20 »
Unless this has changed recently, IS does not allow the prominent use of fonts in vector submissions. GL doesn't like it either. (Hypocritically, IS prominently uses free fonts from Dafont in the designs on its site.)
If you are worried about SS, include a note to the reviewer about where you got the font and that you have the legal right to use it. Sometimes I do that if the font is distinctive.
346
« on: May 18, 2012, 14:14 »
...let's face it, we're the last ones left talking about copyright... it's a vortex ending up with the final devaluation of content creation, text, images, concepts, and anything in between...
Too true. We creatives are in the process of losing our intellectual property rights. The big companies which make billions in profit by providing access to the content of others - while paying the others nothing - are cynically supporting the 'free-shairing' anti-copyright movement (remember when Google and social networking sites et al protested SOPA?). While those companies are quick to sue to protect their software patents.
347
« on: May 18, 2012, 13:57 »
...You're leaving more money than just about anywhere else (other than SS) on the table if you omit IS from your roster of agencies.
It's hard to disagree with that, but the whole microstock world is so complicated that, as many have said above, it is impossible to know exactly what is really going on, let alone predict the future. I am, however, sure of my experience. I started submitting to IS in 2005 and am Gold there. I stopped submitting to IS over a year ago, and since then not only have I saved a ton of time I would have spent jumping through IS hoops only to have good images rejected, but my overall income has gone up considerably. Are customers who would have bought my images at IS finding them elsewhere, so that I do not really lose by ignoring IS? Hard to know for sure, but it is possible, IMO.
348
« on: May 18, 2012, 13:50 »
It's efforts like this to keep us informed that differentiates Shutterstock/BigStock from the Getty/iStocks and Fotolias of the industry.
+1 ($8 adjustment for me)
349
« on: May 17, 2012, 18:57 »
But we CAN do something against it. Just click on "copyright" (right hand menu) on the Pinterest website and you'll find the on-line form.
And when my house was burglarized, I should have spent my time hunting for the burglar and then filled out a form asking him to stop using the stuff of mine he stole.
350
« on: May 17, 2012, 18:47 »
I loved StockXpert. Too bad its owners sold it out to the dark side. As for Stockfresh, let it go the way of Lucky Oliver. That's the fate it deserves.
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