I would first check (and double check) that you have NEVER sold any EL for this image.
I am in the same situation :  found an image sold on canvas at "Maison du Monde", but this image has sold several times as an EL, so I have to assume one of them was bought by Maison du Monde.
Second, I would write them a letter telling them they do not have the license to sell this image on canvas, and you want them to stop selling it immediately + buy the necessary license from you (directly?) + pay you XX $ per sold canvas.  And finally you can suggest that - if they want to continue to sell it, they can pay an additional XXX $.  If you keep the amounts reasonable, they might want to pay instead of go to court?

My bestsellers got hit by the first Best Match change and never recovered.  The whole top 20 simply disappeared and has not returned on page 1 for more than 2 months now.  First month sales were down more than 15% compared to 2012. Now it has recovered a bit and July was only 5% down compared to July12.  I upload every week, so 5% down is not good.

The very idea that IS can compete with SS in the longer term is utterly laughable. Who was it that said "professionals deal with professionals"? Oh yeah __ I just remembered. Boy, is he going to regret that decision within a couple of years from now! It'll be triple-helpings of humble pie for Mr Yuri when he can't feed his '100 employees'. I'm just sitting on my hands waiting for the inevitable to happen.

Don't forget that Yuri's employees consist of two large groups :  the "production" group, needed for shoots, like makeup artists, models etc., and the "distribution" group, needed for submitting the images to 20 or 30 different sites.  Now that he's only with Getty/Istock and his own site, he can probably fire more than 50% of that group (and probably even more once Dreamstime is cleaned up).  So on one hand he gets a nice bag of money from Getty, and on the other hand he saves a lot of expenses by no longer submitting to a whole bunch of sites.

I don't think the price goes back up automatically, you have monitor all of that yourself.
um, what are they doing for their agency% if I have to manually go back, look for sellers and non-sellers, and keep adjusting the price (or deleting).
it's just way too time consuming.

Well, they SAY it will go up AUTOMATICALLY.  See this quote :

Please note that after 6 months without a sale, content prices are automatically set to this price: XS = 1, S = 2, M = 3, L = 4, XL = 5, XXL = 6. If the file has sold 3 times or more, it will be automatically reset to the minimum price (see pricing chart below).

(I added the BOLD).  You can find the quote on this page :
http://www.fotolia.com/Info/Contributors/ImagesPricing
 

Interesting.  Could be a huge success, and could be a flop.  Certainly worth keeping an eye on.  If the site really does not read IPTC, I would bet on the "flop" side.

There might come a day were cell phone cameras and DSLRs deliver equal pixel quality, but how much of an excellent photo is delivered by the quality of the camera?  For a good photo, you also need good lighting (which can cost more than the camera), or an excellent eye for good lighting, and good camera skills. 

I don't think we are afraid of the cell phones, but of the owners of cell phones who might start to think they can make the same quality photos as DSLR photographers.  Is this not what happened at the start of microstock?  Macro photographers being afraid that amateurs would start to think they could make the same quality photos?  Wasn't this caused by Canon releasing the first 300D, the first affordable DLSR ?   

So no, I'm not afraid of cell phones, but yes I fear the new generation of cell phone owners who discover a new hobby, which could grow into serious photography, just as it happened to most of us.

Leeches?

Right now, May resulted in 1/3 of previous months, with only 1 week showing "normal" sales (and peanuts for the other weeks).  This means that if they can "fix" the other weeks, May could be a pretty good month for PP. 

As if there isn't enough to worry about on Istock, so far this morning I have had 40 images from the same series sell in a row, all at large or XL size.   

I should be happy for the windfall, but last time this happened it turned out to be fraud. 

Anyone else notice similar?

A few days ago :  4 EL's of 7$ for images on the same subject.  I didn't think of fraud, I was just annoyed because the EL's were only 7 dollars a piece.  But you're right, 40 is really weird.

Yikes, this felt weird :   my sales just went up with about 30 $, so I thought :  yessss, PP's are coming!! 
One quick look at the stats page told me the PP's were still almost zero.   
I finally found out I had 4 EL's of 7,68 $ each (same subject, same hour, so probably same customer).
I never thought I'd ever be disappointed to see 4 EL's ...

Check out "feck" too, Anyka. It's an interesting Irish word which as far as I know now only exists in English in the form "feckless", it's not a way of saying what you probably think it means.

haha, you caught me, I really thought it meant something different.  You can read my mind across the ocean 

Kom je uit Vlaanderen?

Ja, uit Antwerpen, en jij?

"Snap" indeed!  And that 2009 BME was 3 times the value of my average month in 2013 ... PP included ...