I just found one of my clips that has been uploaded 3 times by 3 different accounts.. 

No I am have had the opposite happen, gone down 1/3 from the Jan-Apr amounts.

Thanks everyone for the comments.
OK so yes the SS and P5 accounts have been removed.
I did receive an additional payment from SS on the date of the account being removed. It may have only been the amount in that account for that month that was from my clip sales (no earning summary, adjustments or stats could be found for the additional amount).
When bringing a Copyright Infringement to SS you need to present it in the correct way, if anyone ever has to do this the below website is useful and formats the correct legal letter to be sent.
https://www.copyrighted.com/dmca-notice-generator

Quote from: Evaristo tenscadisto on May 02, 2023, 11:45
Anyway my point is they can know who is Creativeidea. Also tracking CreativeIdeas P5 sales i can see this contributor had at least 53 sales. With some luck you can figure this out with P5.

How do you find the number of clip sales for someone else's clips on P5? I though this feature was removed some years back?

Quote
You lost me slightly on this part... how is BlackBox involved?

Blackbox also had stolen clips of mine that I came across when doing a search, but they have now removed the offending member and sent me an email to confirm they have done so.

I was very disappointed to discover that a large number (over 200) of my video collection has been duplicated and re-uploaded to Shutterstock, Pond5 and AdobeStock (and probably other stock sites but I haven't checked).
The account goes by the name CreativeVideoIdeas in various forms and there are a lot of videos on this account that are not mine, I have reached out to one other contributor who I could track down but it will no doubt have other contributors videos as well.

On pond5 the account was set up in 2020 and is set to Exclusive even though my content is already on there, so I guess it goes to show they really do not monitor their exclusive upload process if the same content can be uploaded even when it already exist in the database.
https://www.pond5.com/artist/creativeideas
How Shutterstock does not pick it up is surprising as I get rejections for 'similar' content of my own within a batch so to approve the same content goes to show their image recognition software is crap.
https://www.shutterstock.com/g/CreativeVideoIdeas/video

I have reached out to BlackBox about my stolen videos. I know that their videos are from many contributors and I don't want to get their account suspended without them at least taking some steps to remove it, but as yet I can not get a reply from them, so I might in the coming days make a copyright claim against them as well.

Is this kind of thing becoming commonplace with cheap subscription plans allowing anyone to download 1000s of clips for nothing?

Anyway check that clowns account to see if your videos are on it.

Yes I have seen an impact. Sales from Oct 2015 -  Apr 2018 were great, almost better then SS. Since then it has been a noticeable dropoff.
I am returning less now then the first month I uploaded to Storyblocks in March of 2015.
Going off Septembers figures I would say it is 1/6th of the earnings compared to the average month in 2016-2017.

On Saturday I had 3 refunds in one day. I have been getting at least 2 a week.
Does the person who is asking for the refund have the clips? Where they able to download before the refund?
I am deeply concerned that my footage is being stolen. I have investigated refunding a clip that I bought from the store front and it appears you can do it after having downloaded the footage.

Mikes from videoblocks comment on the issue: "The most common reason we offer refunds to our customers are in cases of payment fraud". I do not get it? Either you get the payment or you don't. If it is a credit card it is automatically scanned upon payment to confirm if it is a) legitimate card and is valid b) has credit on it to carry out the transactions. This all happens before payment is approved.

If it is fraudulent and the credit card issuer is at fault then it is covered under the banks insurance (or visa/mastercard) and the bank does not go around asking for it money back for transactions that took place while the card was being used fraudulently.

Payments can not be made via paypal without having either credit in the account or a linked bank account. All of this is checked upon during checkout.

Videoblocks should explain what they talking about as I do not get that it is fraud and not just a refund. The refund feature should be turned off once the clips has being downloaded by the customer.

Yes agreed re stitching. However the stiching is good (no overlap, gaps or lines) except at the top and bottom 5% of the sphere where it joins at the polls.

Thought as much but wanted to confirm as it is stated as 'withheld', under domestic IRS tax laws means recoupable.. not so for us Aliens.
Thanks for the replies and nice disclaimer SpaceStockFootage.. may need a disclaimer for the disclaimer if you are not a lawyer

I will look into the double taxation treaty for my country.

Cheers again!

I bought the Vuze Camera that outputs to 4K and am very disappointed to find that VideoBlocks has rejected all the clips I have taken with the camera due to 'poor stitching' although the stitching is done automatically and actually looks pretty good. Yes you will need to lay down some $ to get something decent and be very careful with the stitching, oh and tripod caps.. alot of sites do not like tripod caps either.

Hi,
I know this subject has been touched upon, apologies for bringing it up again however I have not been able to find any info regarding if it is possible for a Non-US Person to receive a Refunds on US Tax Withheld?
Some of the stock sites (getty, shutterstock) withhold tax for sales made in the states at the withholding rate (depending what the tax treaty is with your country).

Has anyone who is not a US citizen who has filed a W8BN form (which is a given now with ever stock site) ever been able to claim the tax withheld amount back by lodging some kind of form with the IRS?
I have attempted to look into it a few times but have always given up. I was recently discouraged by a site that says "In general, amounts withheld for U.S. taxes are non-refundable".
Is this true? Anyone living outside the US that is not a citizen of the US every claimed the withheld tax?

I agree, something very fishy about the numbers.. That is what I can not get my head around.. Not one sale from such a large number of downloads, it simply does not make sense. Maybe the view count could be high due to as you say some kind of bot crawling but the Preview Downloads? who or what would be downloading such a high number? What is stranger is that the files you would think would be popular do have a higher preview download count then the files that are more ordinary. Which would suggest order to the chaos. Is there anyone else who has an account with naturefootage that has experienced the same thing, large stat numbers but no or few sales?

They said "The preview download is a way for a client to download a low-resolution watermarked comp (360p). This allows them to visually test the clip"

Yes I did download a preview to test and it is low-res with a big watermark.

After quick search I see there is no post regarding Naturefootage.com.
I thought I would write this quick post to others who may be thinking about uploading content to the site.
Over the last few months I have been uploading my HD and 4K wildlife footage which I love shooting, to Naturefootage.com. In that time I have uploaded just over 2400 files of various animal subjects from all over the world. The contributor dashboard section of Naturefootage.com gives you some basic stats like 'View Count' and a 'Preview Download' counter but no sales counter. Shortly after I began uploading I noticed that the view count and preview download count was rocketing with over 30 preview downloads a day. Naturefootage pays quarterly, as you can imagine I though wow I have got to be on to something and I excitedly waited for the payment date. In one quarter I had over 10,000 views and 3000 preview downloads, which I though has got to be worth something. When I buy stock for my own projects I may test a preview download but I pretty much always go with it so I though even if only 10% or 1% of the preview downloads translated to sales I would be happy.
The end of the quarterly payment date came and went, I waited a few weeks then decided to send an email to follow up. I received a reply saying that I had no licensing sales. I could not believe it, from 3200 preview downloads not a single sale.

To rap this up, if you are thinking of contributing to Naturefootage.com do not bother, it will be a massive waste of time.

Thanks

Can you tell me which of the 'Opt Out' options in my account settings will remove my footage files from be purchased under clip packs?
A simple yes it is possible or no you can't will do.
Please no "well you agreed to it by selling your stuff on Shutterstock and should be happy that you get anything", "I love shutterstock, you suck" comments please.

I am getting a tax withheld rate today of $14.15 for a HD clip sales. Yesterday and all sales before it the tax withheld rate was $2.36. Anyone else getting this?

It is now 3 months for footage clips for me. The sales are very very poor compaired to the same volume on the other sites, I think it will be my last batch

Over the past week I have been unable to upload via FTP. I can access the root files but am unable to upload content.
Anyone else having this issue?
I am uploading video so I am not sure if it is just video or other types of media.

Has anyone been having any issues with uploading? Over the last couple of days my upload speeds to 123rf has gone from under 1MB/per sec to 12MB/per sec however none of the footage I have been uploading (since this speed rise) has been showing up?
Anyone experiencing something similar?

I just had a look at my statistics and for the month of December I had 22 returned sales. I think it must be in relation to the fraud issue they had during that time.

Just started uploading my portfolio, not sure how sales will go.
From my observation it really depends on how well a company markets itself and this can change as anyone who has run a website knows.
The daily limit is a little annoying + I notice the add on the top of this forum page says reviewing time wait of 13 mins, the last batch I uploaded was over 2 weeks ago and is still pending so yeah don't pay attention to that add as it is certainly not true but it is an add.

Quote from: authenticcreations on March 10, 2016, 13:24

Quote from: Rick_jo on March 10, 2016, 13:20
If I was to submit a large portfolio of content can I batch process with a csv? I had a read through the info but no mention of it. From what others have written it sounds like adding meta info is tedious process?
Is this something you are working to simplify?

Yes this is possible. Just contact member services. They will help you very fast.

Mirco

Thanks Micro

If I was to submit a large portfolio of content can I batch process with a csv? I had a read through the info but no mention of it. From what others have written it sounds like adding meta info is tedious process?
Is this something you are working to simplify?

Quote from: cobalt on March 02, 2016, 13:16
or maybe there are real legal issues that they know.

Actually it is your job as a photographer to research this beforehand, because the court case will go to you not them. You assure the agency that you have checked all legal aspects before you upload. All agencies have that as a fine print. They do use their own legal guidelines, but that doesn´t absolve you from your responsibility.

Umm good point. But as IS does not accept editorial and all content featuring people should come with a release then the decision to accept content is on them, also as they take the majority cut in royalties then liability would be on them.
I recently spoke to a government body in Australia regarding obtaining a release for Uluru and they told me that they are having a hard time getting IS to abide by Australian law, the issue being that it is possible to get a property release for shooting in a national park but every client that uses the media for whatever purpose also needs to apply for a release form the parks and wildlife services independently. All stock sites are not following this legislation and most including IS do not even mention that buyers should do this. If a countries government body can not get IS to follow the law then I have no concerns.