In this situation, as noted above, they are looking for the owner of the statue to sign a property release. Unless you yourself created that statue, then you would sign the release and state that you sculpted the statue.

No, they're looking for the artist who owns the copyright to the statute to sign the property release, not the owner of the statue. This is a common mistake a lot of people make. Just because you own the statue doesn't mean you own the copyright to it. I normally explain it to photographers like this: If I buy a print of one of your photographs, do you think I should be able to copy it and sell the copies? It's the same principal.

Yinyang, I totally buy that explanation.  But surely the 301 garden gnomes returned in a search are not all property released?  Or one more frequently discussed - the 1821 teddy bears returned by search.  Did those contributors have to jump through hoops to get online? 

Maybe I am doubly scrutinized because of my poor acceptance?

Well there aren't 301 garden gnomes in that search, most don't have a garden gnome in the photo. Of those that are, some are probably old enough not to be copyrighted and some clearly shouldn't have been excepted. You'll see that a search of garden statues yields mostly old works of art (and a few gnomes). But the point is that just because some things got through that doesn't justify letting other violations in.

If it was me, I would just chalk it up in the fubar column and moved on to more productive stock photos. Generic items (no logos), people, etc.

...
Finally, we are doers and not talkers. Our actions speak for us. We concentrate our marketing powers towards the image buyers. Our results, up to know, have been beyond our wildest hopes. We will continue to show you that there is not barriers that we cannot overcome and that we will not stop until we have achieved our goal. We are stubbornly obsessed with success . We hope that if you are too, you will join our growing community.

Sincerely,
Paul Melcher

That was a nice posting Paul. I'd still suggest hiring someone to do P.R. Keith's (zymmetricaldotcom) posting is a prime example of why such a hire is necessary. I can see you're "stubbornly obsessed with success", but it's not coming off in a good way. It's one thing if people were being rude in Keith's office, but this isn't Keith's office. It's an open forum where lively debate on all aspects of microstock occurs.

One question for you: Since you're a "midstock" site, do you offer rights-managed licenses or do you plan to do so in the future?

Is this a long term thing, or is it temporary due to the lack of photos on the site (1,773)?

Some of us still remember remember this thread:
http://www.microstockgroup.com/index.php?topic=2040.0

Yes it is ludicrous! yingyang0 and very much  your own interpretation, I doubt very much that any non Exclusives begrudge the Exclusives "percs" goodness knows they have earned some extra for giving that added Commitment.
 
It is the way it is done!.... the amount of times it is done!!.... and the effect on non-exclusive's Portfolio performance and moral...  Istock need to keep everyone happy to keep up high Standards 

That's just it, the 100% royalties day didn't have an effect on non-exclusives. It's different if the perk has an effect on non-exclusives (such as the supposed favoring in the best match). Perks that actually hurt non-exclusives shouldn't be allowed, but all this one did was provide an extra benefit for a day. It didn't diminish the downloads or royalties for non-exclusives. The problem is that people are saying exclusives and non-exclusives should have all the same benefits. Exclusives sarcafice the right to sell on the other sites and should be compensated for it.

@ madelaide - which advantages has iStock not made clear?

Well... they favor exclusives several ways. More uploads, more money per download and faster approval times. A couple of intangible ways are that the bar for approving an image is lower for exclusives and they show higher in "best match". Sean L. may tell you otherwise, but a bunch of us on the Micropayment list proved it about a year ago...

Um...more uploads, more money per download, and faster approval times are part of the exclusive contract. Nothing about those should be a surprise. Could you show the thread where you "proved" that exclusives have a lower bar? The bar seems to be the same to me.

Go to your member profile, then click on the "stats" tab.

Here's another question:
I tried to attach my own stats to a reply in this thread, but it wasn't possible. Do I have to host it somewhere to do that?

I use photobucket to host the photos.

I've never used the site before but the home pages is displaying mySQL errors, and the search doesn't work (it says it has crashed).

Congratulations to all here who have convinced a competitor to upload 10,000 images to compete with theirs.

LOL, that's the sjlocke I know. I hope you got my sitemail about the idea.

It's working for me, but slower than normal.

You might want to stick with what you know, instead of trying to make believe that you understand the technical intricacies of a large database application.
If you read iStock's confession today (which is available @ http://www.istockphoto.com/forum_messages.php?threadid=57849), then you will see that they have run into a problem with MySQL because of a poorly designed architecture.  From IS's own confession: "Can we continue to grow indefinitely with MySQL? Absolutely. We have looked at how other large sites using MySQL have re-architected to handle much larger loads than iStock currently gets. We can see how this would fit into our system - but we cannot re-architect / rebuild the system over night."

Wow, do you have a degree in computer science? Have you worked on large database apps? I did my masters dissertation on distributed graphics rendering (and I used MySQL) before giving up on computer science and going to law school. My question for you is do you actually know about large scale databases or are you just arguing for the fun of it?

About your quote, did you read all the paragraphs above that? The reason for this mornings crash? The 45 minute recover time, that's because MySQL still doesn't have hotbackups or automatic point in time recovery like Oracle or MS SQL. The locking problems wouldn't have occurred on Oracle or MS SQL since they both have row-level locking while MySQL has limited row-level locking, but mainly table-level.

Here is the quote that counter acts what you quoted: "Then there are solutions that promise huge returns, but would require re-architecting the entire system; rewriting a very large portion of the code and database queries while deploying a new server infrastructure. There were reasons why these approaches were not taken seven years ago when the company was starting - with 5 people running a hobby site on a second hand server."

Then the most important one"I am not going to tell you here which approach we are taking - except to say that we are looking forward to growing the site ten times, fifty times, five hundred times the size of what we are today." They wouldn't have said this if they were going to stick with MySQL. Yes iStock would have to rewrite a lot of code because Oracle databases have slightly different calls and many features would have to be completely rewritten to take advantage of the unique features of the large database systems.

If you feel like continuing to argue then I will write a detail technical explanation for you. In the mean time I'll be considering canceling my exclusive contract.

Edit: Oh, and lastly. "To a database, a transaction is a transaction is a transaction" is a complete misstatement since a view is different from an insert, which is different than a deletion. Not to mention MySQL is a database system without proper transactions.

i don't know much about programing things but i heard someone say before (perhaps it was on here somewhere) that this is the same problem friendster  ran into a little while ago... maybe someone else has more info 

Yeah, that was me. Friendster ran into this exact problem. If someone wants a technical explanation just p.m. me.

It's down for me.