Well, his "cover" has pretty much been blown.  It's now widely known/believed that he's a Getty employee pushing their agenda in the guise of an objective contributor.

You were also convinced at one point that I was part of this conspiracy. Anyhow: widely known/believed by who ? I doubt that more than 10 people in the whole world care.

I think that some people get annoyed and sometimes become quite unfriendly when others have a point of view which contradicts their own. Which is a pity because it discourages free speech.

So let's hope he comes back soon. The site needs posters representing a variety of different perspectives and experiences.

There is nothing stopping a buyer from asking for a refund and still use the image. The system is inviting to be abused

No different from the era of prints and transparencies. You could not know that they had not used them before returning them either. The fact of things being digital makes no difference.

Business works on relationships and trust. I would assume that people at an agency would be aware enough to notice if some client did this more than seemed reasonable or typical.

SS absorbs that cost.

I doubt that many SS customers download their monthly subscription quotas. Therefore I doubt that there is much to absorb.

Also they clearly do refunds:

http://submit.shutterstock.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=2497822#2497822

Negative amounts on footage sales are now appearing on the earnings page at Shutterstock. Some people were questioning these amounts. Since SS dont do refunds, it was quite surprising to see the answer from Shutterstock.

Quote from: VincentJansen

Hi,

I asked the billing department for clarification and they confirmed that these are in fact refunds.

Many books would not get published if publishing worked your way Ron. Especially some of those big coffee table editions which are produced more or less to go directly into the remaindered market.

The thing being missed in this discussion is that when a "buyer" gets an image free for months on end, it's very likely that the image is used to make money in some way.  If the "buyer" is a designer, that image might appear in presentations or mock-ups used to land prospective clients or new jobs.  Even if the customer ultimately goes with another image, your image helped make the sale. 

Or maybe your image, being part of a temporary version of something, ended up sparking ideas or being replaced by something amazingly similar, commissioned for that purpose,

You can argue that in such scenarios the designer wasn't the "customer", but I don't buy that.  In a real sense, someone made money from your image - and you didn't.   If Alamy charges some sort of fee for a returned image, what they actually did was rent that image without paying you a royalty.

I have no doubt whatsoever that any sort of refund requires a proper conversation. Especially if the refund takes places outside of the normal Alamy 30 days. So it isn't something which crafty designers are going to be able to casually regularly exploit.

Bottom line, especially with RM, is that buyers are paying for a specific use. If they end up not going with the image they should be entitled to a refund.

(Think about when you take something back to say an Apple store. There is a good chance that if you approach them right and are honest then the staff in the store will replace a thing even if it is outside of the warranty period. The staff are given a good degree of flexibility to provide a level of service which goes far beyond what the customer if necessarily entitled to under contract etc. And that is exactly how it should be. Because good customer service = repeat business.)

What would be interesting to know how many of these are editorial images.

91576 in the past six months. 14516 in the past month.

(See: more attributes in search)

ETA: 127426 total photos added in the last week of which 2886 were editorial only. Appx 2.3% I think.

ETA: I find these figures constantly change - presumably the databases is continually re-indexing, or something - so this is only a snapshot.

Might also be free credits I think. I have a few free credits currently from a promotion. I think - but might be wrong - that there would be no royalty when those are used. Contributor relations could confirm.

Also - Steel Cage challenge downloads are free too IIRC.

Nice dodge attempt and avoiding the whole subject and point: "All this is why the latest Mac security hole should surprise no one except the Mac lovers who refuse to admit the truth -- Mac OS X, like every other operating system, is vulnerable to attack. And there are plenty of security researchers who think it's less secure than Windows."

That's a quote, not from me. And you start in about Java and removing it?     

Check out the underlined part.

Quote from: Beppe Grillo on January 11, 2014, 04:32

Java for Mac is not an Apple product, it is an Oracle one�

Java is useless for 99.9% of the users.
You have just to disable it unless you are part of the 0.1% needing it.

Modern OS X disables Java if it is not being used. By default. Switch it back on - and it gets switched off again automatically if it is not being used. Unfortunately many Adobe products still require Java to be installed. Bizarrely. Personally I think that the day is drawing closer when we will no longer need Adobe (but I guess that is a different thread).

Safari does a neat thing with browser plugs-ins e.g. Flash. They are off by default. You authorise them on a per site basis. So, for example, I have Flash enabled only for Alamy because Manage Images requires it. Flash is also periodically switched off to save battery power. Safari also blocks 3rd party cookies by default. It blocks out of date browser plug-ins.

OS X users are certainly subject to the same stupid javascript pop-up exploits as Windows users (e.g. - the bogus FBI ransomware thing). Defeating this is as simple as Safari -> Reset Safari. OS X includes built in protection against real malware (which you would need to deliberately try to install). Better still (and this is great for anyone who looks after a computer perhaps for someone else) Gatekeeper lets you set the machine such that only programs from the Apple OS X app store can be installed.

It would be tempting fate and silly to claim that OS X and Unix variants in general are definitely more secure than Windows. But it is certainly true that they have tended to be so far. That is definitely partly down to Windows representing a bigger target. It is also because Unix has always been much more about one tool per job - where as Windows was very much about a daft vision of integration even back to the days of OLE, Active X and scriptable software. They deliberately built a system of bits in which one thing could, in theory, be controlled from another. Though my experience on a team producing Windows software back then was that it nearly always crashed anyhow. I always felt much more at home in a Unix environment.

(I can happily build computers. I soldered one together in 1981 with a Radio Ham friend - you could not buy motherboards ready made in those days. Today I could build a machine which would run OS X - if I wanted to. But I Jonny Ive makes nicer computers and I deplore clutter and top posting).

The fact that some people sometimes use Google Images to find images to use does not necessarily mean that this is what Google Images is most used for.

I believe that most uses of Google Images are not to find images to use. People use it to look at things - or to find things by looking - or to remember what a particular actor looks like, or a car, or a place or some other thing - etc.

----

It is certainly true that many people seem to find it extra-ordinary that they cannot make commercial use of whatever image they want. There is at least one forum on the internet which is devoted to people swapping outraged stories about how they have received letters from agency lawyers because they have used unlicensed content commercially.

Quote from: bunhill on January 14, 2014, 07:54

The average person is not using Google Images to look for images for a blog, newsletter, card ...

My guess would be that the average person very much shops like this.

my point was that the average person is not blogging - and that the average person does not have a need for commercial content. Sue addressed this.

Most Google image searches are not by people looking for images to buy (or steal).

I don't know about blogging, as I prefer 'proper' websites but every organisation I'm a member of or affiliated to, and companies we have stocks in or my husband advises, sends out paper and/or digital newsletters.

Yes commercial users. But they already know that they should pay for content. Ditto commercial blogs. They know that if they cheat (and the content is not subscription) then they risk getting an agency demand (if they are somewhere copyright is respected). Though many commercial blogs depend on content distributed as PR which is free to use anyhow.

It's the average person you were talking about. And the average person is blogging less and less. Social media took over. Ditto community newsletters, church groups etc. All that stuff went to Facebook mostly which is partly why old fashioned microstock is likely to be a declining market IMO. 

How would the average person know about this?

It's not for the average person. Why would the average person want to know about this ?

they will survive well but they ain't getting rich

Perhaps (just suppose) that they are not greedy. Suppose they might be happy enough to just build a sustainable business where money in > money out.