Quote from: Mimi the Cat on January 09, 2025, 09:30
I'll keep the shutterstock account open until the merger happens then delete everything.

I'm lucky if I make $50 a month now compared to $300 to $400 per month a few years ago.

I'm sick of their squeezing contributors

Same here mate

The industry has been dying since the creation of AI. I think what will happen in the next few years is that the biggest companies will start buying the smallest ones until only one company takes over the little market that is left...

I'm curious: for US citizens, microstock agencies withhold the taxes amount like for foreigners? For me for example they withhold 30% of the incoming for sales in USA.

Quote from: Zero Talent on April 07, 2024, 14:10
I used TurboTax and I remember that there are provisions to declare taxes withheld outside the US.
I have a bit of that myself, not from microstock, but from a non-US investment fund.

You have ITIN?

Quote from: Jo Ann Snover on April 07, 2024, 00:41

Quote from: Mrblues101 on April 06, 2024, 17:59
...I am clear that I do not have to pay taxes since the agencies already pay them through the 30% withholding, but...

I am a US resident and am not an expert in tax law or the IRS, but I wanted to clarify what you said about withholding.

Taxes are owed on the basis of your return, filed with the IRS. The return will show the calculation of total tax owed and also the amount already withheld during the tax year. If there is a difference, you either pay the extra or get a refund.

There is no correspondence between what you owe and what was withheld - although it's important to try and have the right amount withheld to avoid incurring penalties for underpayment during the tax year. So you could owe more than the 30% withheld and the only way to know that is complete a return.

My suggestion is that you get whoever helped you to set up the LLC to help with the tax issues - or recommend an accountant to do it.

Thank you for your clarification Jo Ann

To be honest, my ability to check if SS or any other agency made more or less sales within the US is completely null. I just have to trust in the information they send me, and if I have to report, just report it.

Now my big issue is if I have to fill 1040NR or not, because if I have to fill I have also to get an ITIN as soon as possible.

Dear friends, as you know for a long time, like most of you, I am in the microstock business.

I am not a citizen or resident of the United States, and every year I receive several 1042-S forms reporting the 30% withholding for sales made in the USA (due to royalties).

As a non-US resident, I never paid much attention to these forms, nothing to do with them.

But, last year my situation changed. Although I continue to receive a significant income from royalties from the sale of my images, the business has dropped significantly and I have been forced to look for new ways to make money. For this reason, last year I formed an LLC in the United States (to carry out a business not related to microstock, by the way).

Therefore, I must now respond to the IRS. As a non-US resident with an LLC in the USA, every year I must fill out forms 1120 and 5472; but also the 1040NR, the latter only if I have sales associated with the United States.

A single member LLC reports taxes through the owner, so business and personal profits are the same.

My question is: Should I report anything for receiving the 1042-S forms from the microstock agencies?

I am clear that I do not have to pay taxes since the agencies already pay them through the 30% withholding, but this issue of taxes and the IRS is very complicated and sometimes you have to report things and if you don't you have big penalties.

I would appreciate if anyone could give me any information regarding this.

Quote from: cascoly on September 18, 2023, 19:33
once again, you neither understand how these generators work, nor the massive programming involved. have you worked on such huge projects?

if everyone can optout at any time the training would have to be continuous, and there's no indication original images used would still be available - where are those billions going to be fud and how would they be able to identify your work?

but again, you dont understand how these work -; once trained, there is NO way to trace back to original training set.

What AIs do, they do from our work. From my point of view it is a much more sophisticated form of copyright infringement, but in essence it is the same.

Our work (copyrighted material) was used to produce something new, and that "something new" is sold without giving us royalties.

The semantics of "training" an AI and the definition of "training a machine", which must be expressed in thousands of words, do not change the essence of what is being done.

I totally agree

Our years of work was used without our authorization to train the "system" that now leaves us without a job.

We should receive a percentage of the royalties produced by AI images (no matter how little money it was).

Stop working on Microstock and doing something else...

His answer:

"Did we really pay you that much? It must be a bug in the system, you should have only received a few cents."

Quote from: Uncle Pete on December 31, 2022, 17:29
Original content is NOT modified or used, so I'd say, that's not important or relevant. Images and descriptions are only used to train the AI.

Exactly, in the same way your brain changes when you read a book and you learn about globalization (for example) being able to talk about it, or write about it, but without this meaning that you are infringing the copyright of the original book. You learn about something, and now you are able to create something new by using the new learning.

This is how machine learning works, and law now understand that new creations by AI based on machine learning, owe nothing to the elements they have used to learn.

Quote from: Uncle Pete on December 29, 2022, 17:08

Quote from: Mrblues101 on December 29, 2022, 03:02
Is there any chance of we keeping getting this payment day by day, week by week or month by months??

After all, soon the AI will create images based in our work.

By the way... who is the owner of the copyright when AI creates something?? And specially when this "something" is based in previous copyrighted creations??

Is there any copyright law about AI creating things???

I'm just guessing, like everyone else, that these are make up payments for past licensing in 2022. I don't think they will become daily or anything else, but maybe every six months as SS has told us. Most of that is irrelevant, isn't it? I mean if we get payments twice a year from what's accumulated or once a month, what's the difference.

More important questions are about who owns the rights.

New images are not created based on something previously copyrighted. The new images are based on Machine Learning and the images are new creations. AI doesn't use our images, it uses what the machines has learned about something.

So if the machine has been fed 2,000 images of a Banana, it learns that a banana is is basically, black, or brown, or green or yellow. Then the machine learns what a banana shape is. The machine also learns characteristics of the middle and ends and lines and other parts, maybe the insides as well as other parts or slices or variations of a banana. When someone says they want an image, created by AI that includes a banana, the computer uses everything it knows and creates a new banana. Our images are not directly used.

Who owns the results? That depends on the service someone uses. Open AI / DALL-E2 we own the rights and the images can be used commercially. But Open AI also retains the right to use the image, if they want.

Others you can only use commercially if you paid for the service. And I'm surer there are other versions of the contract.

This will have to go into the courts and be decided, and this is new territory, so there isn't much case law to use for an answer. TBD. One case the courts decided that an AI creation, can't be copyrighted.

However because we enter the words and the software is only a tool, those results are argued to be different.

If anyone wants to read the involved details:  https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=4f5fb5fa-b968-4049-8297-0cff617917b5#:~:text=In%202014%20the%20US%20Copyright%20Office%20expressly%20established,IT%20system%20could%20not%20qualify%20for%20copyright%20protection.

"Therefore, it would seem that AI works autonomously produced by the IT system could not qualify for copyright protection. In other words, protection could be granted only when there is human intervention in the process carried out by the AI. After all, one has to bear in mind that the approach toward AI should be based on the key principle according to which the center and focus of the protection is and remain the human being. "

Thank you for your very complete answer.

This is a very new topic and laws are clearly being created now.

I used OpenAI a while ago, but to see the potential of AI writing. It's very impressive as it was able to create some short stories with the information I put. However, as far as I understand this AI was trained with books and texts in the public domain.

This time they used our images that are not in public domain... perhaps this whole issue stems from the fact that SS used our work without proper authorization from us. They have the clearance due to a devious legal trick by updating the terms and conditions and put this new condition on it, but I don't think anyone would have agreed to this deal if we had been explicitly asked.

Is there any chance of we keeping getting this payment day by day, week by week or month by months??

After all, soon the AI will create images based in our work.

By the way... who is the owner of the copyright when AI creates something?? And specially when this "something" is based in previous copyrighted creations??

Is there any copyright law about AI creating things???

I am a little confused about this and I am also interested in all this issues because I am trying to incorporate a LLC as non resident in US (not related to MicroStock).

So, you are trying to sell images by using your company?? Or they became crazy and are asking you to fill taxes papers as company??

What about using ITIN?

Quote from: Reimar on December 24, 2022, 00:01

Quote from: wds on December 23, 2022, 23:54

Quote from: SpaceStockFootage on December 23, 2022, 09:33

Quote from: wds on December 22, 2022, 18:16
What's the justification for not telling the contributor which images were purchased for this usage?

Probably nowhere near enough space to list them all.

Are you implying that these line items we see correspond to more than one asset?

No images were "purchased".  Parts of our collections were used in training AI in generating new content.  So yes, more than one "asset".

Exactly, the portfolio that took us a lifetime to make was used to make our profession obsolete.

Welcome to the future.

Quote from: wds on December 22, 2022, 18:16
What's the justification for not telling the contributor which images were purchased for this usage?

I think images wasn't purchased in the traditional way, but they sell the right for the AI to check all of them to get info from them.

They will pay this just one time?? Or every month/year??

The amount is proportional to the sympathy the AI has for you.

In the case of a possible apocalypse by robots and AI, we must send a congregation made up of those who receive the most money in the contributor column, to conduct peace negotiations.

I think once I open my LLC in US, after I get my ITIN, then I should include the ITIN in my W8BEN form. What I don't want is that royalties in microstock agencies made the company taxes papers more complicated, but I think this will not affect the forms.

Quote from: SpaceStockFootage on December 15, 2022, 03:17
You need to apply to the IRS to get a ITIN... but you don't really need one, as a non-US individual you should be using your Foreign Tax Identification Number, which is your tax ID in your own country. Although if you have, or do, set up a US company then you'll be using the ITIN instead, which should be provided to you at some point during the setup.

Thank you for your reply SpaceStockFootage.

Yes, I was unable to formulate the question properly due to my ignorance of the US tax system.

Now I research more, my original question is: did I get an ITIN by filling the microstocks tax forms??

And the reply is actually NO.

And I actually don't want an ITIN now, because as non-US resident if I already have one, then the process is apparently more complicated.

Quote from: maxop-plus on December 09, 2022, 13:06
Hello everyone,
                recently I started with vectors and I would like to know whether I can submit the same vector to more stockagencies? I already submitted a few vectors to SS and I want to be sure before I submit elsewhere. I plan to Adobe, SS, Dreamstime and that is. Can you recommend some other vectorstock? These days I dont expect much, but every dime counts. Thanks a lot.

Hello Maxop-plus.

Yes, you can. It is what we are doing since years. But if you upload an image to an agency under the "exclusive" status, then you can't upload this image to another agency.

I never use it, but there is a software that upload to multiple agencies. This could be time saving.

Ok, I just keep researching about it, and I realize that the "number" I was talking about is the ITIN (Individual Tax Identification Number).

So, by filling the SS and DT tax forms, did this assignated me an ITIN??

Quote from: cascoly on December 07, 2022, 18:52

Quote from: Mrblues101 on December 07, 2022, 14:19
I am not as active in MicroStock business since SS change the payment rates in 2019... anyway sometimes I still upload some pics and I also get a floor incoming from my previous work...

Anyway, I am considering creating a new company within USA being non-resident.

I just want to ask, did my old SS and DreamsTime US tax payer status make this process more complicated? After all, I am a tax payer within USA.

In the other hand, I always have two different forms, one for DreamsTime and one for SS, this was ok?? Or should I see the way to use the same number and same forms for both agencies??

you'll need to check with the IRS website for details on any changes

but old statements shouldn't matter - you would just report the 1099 you receive for current tax year

not sure which 'number' you're referring to

I also don't know about the 'number' I am refering, I just never pay attention to tax thing up to now. My point with the 'number' is that by filling the form I get a "US tax payer ID" or something, and once I get I should use the same for each agency (??).

I never do nothing with the 1099 form I get from SS, my interpretation was that by not being US recident I should use this in my country for local taxes proposes, I am wrong?

I am not as active in MicroStock business since SS change the payment rates in 2019... anyway sometimes I still upload some pics and I also get a floor incoming from my previous work...

Anyway, I am considering creating a new company within USA being non-resident.

I just want to ask, did my old SS and DreamsTime US tax payer status make this process more complicated? After all, I am a tax payer within USA.

In the other hand, I always have two different forms, one for DreamsTime and one for SS, this was ok?? Or should I see the way to use the same number and same forms for both agencies??