At the Berlin Lypse in May 2012 an admin said there were 5500 exclusives.

Quote from: cobalt on January 15, 2013, 19:40

A member form the German community who has just quit hois exclusivity has started a new facebook group that is highly active.

Can you give us a link to that group?

It is a closed group in German language only. I think he wants to keep it for his friends and colleagues. If you are fluent in German, send me a sitemail, then I can send you a link and you can ask him to join.

It consists mostly from people on the German istock forum and many have met each other at events or dinners.

But basically they discuss the same things we say here, quote the same articles, share information  for those who have already quit their exclusivity.

There isn�t any really new information, it is just all in German which benefits those who find it really hard to follow the English boards.

On the deleting cause: I haven�t deleted anything yet, but I am going over my portfolio to see what I MUST save or where I would be ashamed as hell if those files every ended up for free re-distribution.

I haven�t uploaded much in the last two years and now I am grateful.

I�ll give you a number as soon as I have one.

Google is "curating" - looking for more content. Artist beware!

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dDJzSUtIRl82MXdJTG9LaWpadWtCWEE6MQ#gid=0

My problem with RM is that simply at that price point it is usually a lot cheaper and more efficient to have a designer whip up something totally unique for you, something noone can rent from any library and that was created exclusively for you and whatever occasion you need it (trade show, important company brochure, yearly catalogue etc...

I do see a place for RM for some highly unusual images. A polar bear dancing in a pink dress, rare animals in the wild where only 3 are deemed to exist, heart transplant surgery, very specific industry shots like engineering shots on oil plattforms all model and property released etc....

Authentic files like these, I think RM is the right place for them.

But they always have to be balanced with what a good designer can do with photoshop or illustration. He or her are the real enemies of RM, not just the masses of royalty free content.

Of course when you are doing a large advertising campaign any image renting costs are negligable. Even 50 000 to rent one image for three months is peanuts compared to what a large stand costs at a regular industry trade show.

So I do see a certain base level market that will always be there. But I would think that the only way to create a reliable income from it, would be to stay industry specific.

I used to work in the traffic engineering field, actually I grew up in it. I know all the major players, it is a very tightly knit network of companies with just very few, industry specific trade shows. the end client, cities and engineering offices, don�t go there, so the whole thing is one small club although they are serving a world market. Obviously they don�t all love each other either and waste their time and money in all kinds of aggressive ego boosting court cases.

If I wanted to, I could create great photos and videos for general use in this industry. I could use my old contacts to take images of the latest technology. I know what kind of imagery they need. I know all the magazines and websites and trade shows they advertise in, becuase I used to do it myself.

But here is the thing: to license it - I don�t need getty anymore. In the old catalogue days, i would have needed an agent to handle it for me. But for industry specific content where you need insider knowledge to take the pictures - you can handle all the licensing yourself through the internet. My family name is a lot better known in the industry than Getty or any library anyway.

And this holds true for every other niche subject, especially in technology. If you know how to shoot it, if you have the contacts, if you want to make money from "your" home industry, IMO you would be totally crazy to let an agency handle the licensing for you. After all the work of getting locations, people and shooting right, you already have everything you need to license.

So what kind of RM market is left where you as the specialized artist cannot license directly?

I believe this would be rare quality shots that however are more generic, i.e. they can be used in multiple industries. that is when an agncy like getty or any other agency might be useful.

So this is my take from a business managers perspective of the RM market.

From what I understand (your lawyer will explain it better) it all hangs on what kind of right to negotiate licenses in our name did we transfer to istock and getty.

istock and getty claim, they can more or less do what they want, wether it is endless "promotional deals" where I discover by accident that Microsoft is giving away 25 files of mine for free for endless re-distributio to unregistred buyers or the google docs deal where we got paid 12 dollars for a special extended license to endless free redistribution via google docs, with all metadata stripped. Please direct your lawyer also to the Microsoft thread in the istock forums. In there the gettylawyer goes out and claims it was a promotional deal and they wouldn�t anything like this today. And just the next day...the community finds the google deal. Particalyrly bad is that google promotes it as "crowd sourced "donations" from thinkstock, never mentioning that these are regular commercial stock images.

I am so glad your lawyers are looking into this. Please get back to us and let us know what happened.

In the meantime, many are just choosing to show their distrust of getty by voting with their feet and leaving.

When are you accepting video or other artists, Yuri?

These people cannot even get the istock site to work properly, they have basically crashed the extremly active istock community and made everyone run away and hide in closed facebook groups or other forums. The traffic to istock keeps going down, the independents are all cheering Shutterstock and somebody seriously believes they have some "secret master plan" to destroy anything?

You need to be smarter than the other people in the industry to be more successful than them.

I see a lot of money being pumped in from the getty family.

But I don�t see the brainpower to dominate anything.

They�ll just crash istock and after that getty with it, then look for another investor to bail them out or the getty family puts up even more money.

And that is the real danger. They are not ready to do what the company needs to do - invest in optimising their own site, expand the company by growing organically instead of looking to buy other companies at much too high prices for something they could have easily done themselves.

Streamline communication and efficiency in their own business instead of having all the different departments work without being connected. Instill a business culture and a drive for excellence. Work on the week-end. No corporate double speak. No looking for the blame "ELSEWHERE" when it is obviously your own mess up.

Encourage people to take responsibility and get real life results, stop being "employee driven". Combining a line of buzzwords are not a form of work.

etc...

What I see is a management that is simply not ready to get their hands dirty with all the nerdy day to day details that need to be optimized. It is obviously a lot more fun to play around with impressive and cool sounding new software and dream of monetizing views, click, click, click for every eyeball. Become the next google adwords. In fact encourage google adwords to add little images like facebook and then get paid for every google click.

Instant money! Free Money! No work ever again!

Endless parties in the pink room...

No I am not worried about that. If they cannot get the community to work, cannot increase buyer traffic, their teams have no clue what is going on in the business, artists are deactivating content and leaving to other sites...no I don�t think anyone needs to be scared.

In the right hands this new technology might be really successful, maybe even a postive force for the industry. But I think you are all giving them too much credit if you fear them.

Whatever Masterplan they have - you can trust them to mess it up.

I just posted this question in the new google thread. Does anyone know if registered works were chosen for MS or Google deals?


cobalt

Posted 7 mins ago
Quote

I have a question for the community and maybe one of the admins can answer this question. A photographer from the German community last week gave me a "lecture" on the differences of copyright law around the world. My background is something else, but apparently it was a required class wherever he studied. According to him, German copyright, or "Urheberrecht" is vastly different from the US copyright and offers a lot more protection to teh artist. It cannot be sold or transferred, it "sticks" for life to the artist and his creations as long as he resides in Germany.


Even stronger, according to him, are all files registered under US copyright law. I have never registered anything before and I am now looking into it.


So my question to the community and getty would be: are there any registered works in the MS/Google free redistribution deal?


Would registering unpublished works before uploading and then adding the registration number to each file (or a sentence making it clear the work is registered) prevent files to be "elected" for these "deals".


If registered works are not chosen for free re- distribution, then maybe this would give us a practical solution going forward. We could register whatever believe needs to be exempted and Getty could select from the others.


The best solution would be the simple one: create a lightbox, allow us to chose "donation images" and fullfill your marketing speak truthfully about "user generated content donated to the media community"


Getty themselves encourage registration, they even have a special field for it upon uploading. maybe here on istock we have been too negligent to do it.


So - would registering have any effect on if that file gets chosen? You clearly said you don�t choose RM files. How about registred works? can they be selected and distributed to millions of unregistred users? Does it influence the value of their protection in any way?

I sincerly hope that pressure from high ranking getty contributors will achieve an opt out. Many exclusives wgith portfolios with over 7000 files. even if they know they need to walk away they still need time to prepare.

what is happening is that many people have dropped other file exclusivity, first video then ilustrations adn are actively building portfolios elsewhere. others are just out looking for jobs, even part time.

if there is no opt out of these deals, the. I will go over my content and see what needs immediate saving and what is so old, that I can risk losing control of it.

but most important that i find time in my daily life to shoot more videos and upload to the other sites. i am quite pleased with the results even if my portfolio is tiny.

obviously if there is no opt out and the disrespect continues, then i must pull out. again, i would need to first secure another job before iwalk away.

but i won't just deactivate the whole portfolio. the connections built are my work and you cannot rule out that getty gets old again in 2 years to people who have better business instincts.

the management can come and go, the marketplace will stay.

but what getty has done is make me focus on video and exploring other sites in detail. anyway, they don't need us. istock is trly dead.

When will they have video?

The admin post is fine and if Simon says that the majority of customers don�t use the slider then I believe him. What i would really want is the possibility to add my own choice of files into the value collection.

I am absolutely for anything that makes the buyers life easier and more transparent.

The real problem was the accidental discovery, without an announcement at a time when everyone is waiting for a statement from HQ about the google/MS disaster.

Again it shows that an overall manager who looks after the business is somehow lacking. There seem to be many disconnected departments from getty all working on their own doing their thing and nobody who aligns and focusses them.

If istock forces me to give up exclusivity to protect my IP then I will never go artist exclusive again anywhere. Image exclusivity? Yes.

If enough people are interested and especially if Sean endorses the site, then I would support pushing GI forward.

Many inepedenents have pointed it out for years that it is best for the artist if several sites keep competing with each other and for our content. However, i still believe that the internet favors extralarge Marketplaces.

With istock/getty going down, it will probably be Shutterstock.

I was exclusive with an agency that only sold files from their own site.

This has nothing to do with istock. Gettyimages is a huge white label distribution network and apparently operates with a different idea of what they can do with my IP.