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Messages - Shelma1

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1
Off Topic / Re: Any techie camera-hacking folks out there?
« on: December 24, 2020, 16:57 »
maybe they think you are spying on them?

No, theyve been at it for a while and I only recently thought to record them.

2
Off Topic / Re: Any techie camera-hacking folks out there?
« on: December 24, 2020, 11:02 »
Why are they doing all this, just for fun because they are jerks?

Yes, that's my guess. It seems to be their main form of entertainment.

3
Off Topic / Re: Any techie camera-hacking folks out there?
« on: December 24, 2020, 11:01 »
I can't possibly imagine what's in their minds, really. I don't understand why people harass other people. What a waste of precious time and effort, IMO.

I guess what I'm asking is, can anyone recommend a video camera good for shooting in low light? They seem to be able to defeat infrared devices, but not a regular video camera behind glass. In the meantime I'm planning to move because these people are not right in the head.

4
Off Topic / Any techie camera-hacking folks out there?
« on: December 23, 2020, 21:03 »
My neighbors are harassing meto the point that I'm suing themand for months I've been sure they're disabling my Blink security cameras at night. They already broke into some wildlife cameras on my property, took out the SD cards, deleted the videos of themselves approaching the cameras and put the cards back in. Tonight I set up a cheap Panasonic video camera in a window in my house, and captured my neighbor driving down their driveway, turning off their car, and then pointing some sort of devicea laser? Infrared light? at the security camera on my front door. Whatever they're using is not handheld, because it moves smoothly up and down without any wobble whatsoever. They wait until dark, so my footage is awful. I lightened it in iMovie (can you tell I'm not a videographer?), but it's super grainy.

Does anyone have any idea what the heck they could be doing...and how I might get better video of them without using infrared light? I can't tell you how much this is creeping me out. If you want to see the bad video, PM me. Thanks!

5
Even people who pay for images dont read the license terms. Why would people downloading free images bother to read them? Also, Adobe feels theyll somehow be educating people, but how? You can download the images just by clicking the button. And the search is set by default to your last search parameters, so anyone downloading free images will have free images as their search automatically next time they visit. I just dont see how this 1) educates anyone about anything and 2) encourages people to pay for images or even to see images they have to pay to license. I dont even see how it will get more people to license Adobe software. If you feel images should be free, you most likely feel software should be free too.

6
I propose that you limit the maximum number of downloads to 10 photos per day, 2 videos, 5 illustrations ... and add 1 extra free per photo purchased with real money

I propose they allow 5 free downloads per day of their software per person.

7
So I now see Adobes press releases everywhere, with people crowing about how Adobe is democratizing art by giving away images and footage for free, effectively helping to put tens of thousands of us out of business.

I dont see any press releases about Adobe democratizing anything by giving away their software for free, though. Wouldnt that be helpful, if Adobe fought their competitors who make their software available for free by also offering Adobe software for free? I know creatives were really angry that Adobe switched to a yearly subscription, which costs people a lot more.

Weird that Adobe thinks people should pay more for their software and nothing for other peoples work.

To be fair, Adobe did pay the artists for submitting their content to the free collection.

Yes, we all know that. And theres nothing fair about this.

8
Wouldn't it be better for Adobe to offer their software for free to attract people to paying decent rates for stock art? Makes much more sense to me.

9
So I now see Adobes press releases everywhere, with people crowing about how Adobe is democratizing art by giving away images and footage for free, effectively helping to put tens of thousands of us out of business.

I dont see any press releases about Adobe democratizing anything by giving away their software for free, though. Wouldnt that be helpful, if Adobe fought their competitors who make their software available for free by also offering Adobe software for free? I know creatives were really angry that Adobe switched to a yearly subscription, which costs people a lot more.

Weird that Adobe thinks people should pay more for their software and nothing for other peoples work.

10
Quote
The program also supports a need for creative democratization to make high quality content available to all.

Does this mean everything needs to be priced to the lowest common denominator, or given away for free? i.e. people who normally couldn't afford stock images or video are now able to acquire that content, just because the barrier needs to be lowered to cater to everyone?

Why? What's wrong with making content available only to those who can afford it? It's not like stock images are overly expensive. Do artists have to suffer income loss just because some people can't or don't want to pay a reasonable license fee?

Why not give Adobe software away for free to attract people to licensing images?

12
Actually, the photos are paid, with an agreement between the artist and AS. Free is for the customer. AS pays for images, whether they are downloaded or not. Logically, you will have the best of the best, they will not give away anything that is not extraordinary. At an agreed price, whether the image is downloaded or not.

If that was directed at me, that's not the point. Regardless if the people who own the free photos are paid, more free photos hurts the people like us who aren't being directly paid.

Who remembers free ad-based internet from the late 1990s? You open the app to connect and while the 56K modem takes a minute to brrrr-weeee-bing-bong you get to stare at an advertisement. For a while a I didn't pay for internet. Why would I if free internet was available? Over time the free services would go out of business. So I kept finding new ones until there were no more free internet providers and I had no option but to pay. And that's what needs to happen with free photos. They need to go away because the more free options that are available the fewer people will buy photos. One of these filthy rich stock companies needs to buy out these free sites and shut them down. Or creatives need to come to their senses and realize they're hurting themselves and the entire industry by submitting content to free sites.

The problem is that they're not hurting themselves. Look at Freepik. They made their money by stealing work and offering it for free, and Shutterstock allowed them to earn affiliate money. Then when they had enough money to make people pay they suddenly got selective and invited a chosen few to upload high quality work, which they make good earnings from, if you believe what people are saying. So someone like me loses tons of money while they give away my stolen work, but Freepik makes money, and Shutterstock gets referral business, and a select number of contributors get chosen to get a windfall while the getting's good.

Freepik then went on to become an Adobe affiliate, and now Adobe has made a deal with some of those contributors to pay them in advance and give their work away "free" in order to attract more creatives to Adobe software. So you have a small group of contributors quietly cutting deals with Shutterstock, Freepik, Adobe, etc. while the rest of us get shut out, have our royalties slashed and eventually give up.

13
Oh, so the work produced by this program will be free too? It just sounds like a continuation of what youve already done. Youre paying a salary of 12.5K (less than the federal minimum wage in the U.S.) to artists to provide their work for free. Or did I misunderstand something?

14
Sorry, but this is like someone punching you in the face ten times, and then after you ask them to stop because theyre hurting you, they punch you in the face nine times.

15
I get it, we are all in survival mode.

We may be, but Adobe isn't. Their stock price has soared this year. https://money.cnn.com/quote/quote.html?symb=ADBE

16
^^^ I cant like this comment enough. Its just like the statue of the brave little girl facing down the Wall Street bull, paid for and dreamed up by an investment firm that has a dismal record of hiring and promoting women. Smoke and mirrors.

And the request to keep comments about both announcements in separate threads, as if theyre not connected, and as if keeping the announcements separate will somehow keep us from connecting them.

17
I see when I go to stock.adobe.com not signed in, the default search is free.

18

...I reached out to the team ... I expect changes will be made in the future.


Mat, I don't envy your situation, and I know you're relaying information on our behalf, but...

We - contributors - have heard a lot about things Adobe will be doing on the contributor side of things, but not much has been delivered. Getting the stats back to what Fotolia had, searching our portfolios (on the contributor side) by keywords, and on and on - you know the list, I know.

If we could get a commitment from the development team and a rough date for when these changes (to ensure paid content shows in free searches) would happen, that would make this more than "let's do lunch sometime". Jim Pickerell's article says "Adobe intends to monitor and fine tune the collection on a daily basis". It doesn't provide details, but if work is ongoing, let's make this less of a gut punch for existing contributors by keeping paid content visible.

If I were in a position to define what should happen, in addition to showing paid content in searches with very few results, I'd also say that every single page of search results of free images should have one row of paid content (preferably up top, but even below would be OK). IMO, there should never be any page without some paid content visible. You could make the paid content row smaller thumbnails if you wanted, but it should just be there somewhere so the site doesn't look like Unsplash.

They were much too busy cutting deals with a few contributors and setting up a free section to have time to make any improvements for the rest of us.

19
I just dont know which sites to recommend to my colleagues any more. Or whether its worth doing this any more. All the sites seem to be finding exciting ways to rip us off. You pull your work from iStock because theyre giving stuff away for a penny, and you concentrate on Shutterstock. Then Shutterstock slashes royalties, and you pull your work from SS and upload more to Adobe...only to have Adobe give away competing images for free. Pond5 and Alamy must be working on their own exciting news now that weve migrated to them. But its a really fun year otherwise! Ha ha.

20
Matt. Do you think it is a good sign that people only viewed and still didn't comment? Not good feeling really. The pattern is already known

I expect there to be questions and concerns from the contributors which is exactly why I started this conversation before the email went out. I know many people read the posts in this forum without commenting so to answer your specific question, I don't "view" that as a sign in any way.

I can assure you that I've been asking hard questions of the team and I genuinely believe this program has the potential to benefit contributors in several ways. I'll share a couple of key takeaways from my original questions here.

First, the contributors with content in the free collection were compensated in advance for their participation. While it's limited to select contributors now, we'll allow others to participate as time goes on. The content in the free collection will be rotating to keep it fresh and relevant. As content leaves the free collection, it returns to the paid collection.

Second, and I believe most importantly, if you browse the Adobe Stock free collection, you'll see that there are a lot of assets that cover a wide range of subjects, but no one particular subject has a deep selection to choose from. That is by design. When someone who typically only uses free sites visits Adobe Stock, they now have the opportunuity to see more search results beyond free. This is a potential customer base that was not visiting paid sites historically. The result should be an expanded market for paying customers.

I welcome your feedback and look forward to the conversation.

-Mat

What I see in the free vectors, searching within my niches, is simpler ripoffs of some of my illustrations. I'm sure if other illustrators look they'll find the same thing. So now I'm competing against someone who's copying my work and getting paid in advance to offer it for free and take sales from me.

Yay.

Who knows of a good, free alternative to Adobe Illustrator? I'd like to switch to that, and maybe it'll attract me to Adobe's product and I'll feel the sudden urge to pay for it instead of the free software.

21
 >:(

22
Off Topic / Re: The greatest woman ever Died today
« on: October 07, 2020, 22:25 »
With hindsight it's easy to say she should have retired but there very well could have been another Democrat in after Obama.

Actually, history doesn't support that argument. Neither one of America's main political parties tends to hold the presidency for more than two terms in a row.

There are exceptions, of course (Reagan's 2 terms + GHW Bush's 1 term), but generally you'll find a long-established pattern of two terms/eight years of one party followed by two terms/eight years of the other.

I have a strong hunch that Justice Ginsburg knew that.

Yet HRC won by almost 3 million votes. The country wanted another Democratic POTUS. Hanging chads, the supreme court and the electoral college have handed the presidency to losers. The Democratic party needs to grow a freaking backbone and fight like h*ll against the gross unfairness that leads to these outcomes. At this point only 29% of registered voters are Republican. Dont blame Ginsburg for the nefarious machinations of the Republican party. Point the blame for this farce of a presidency and a stacked supreme court where it belongs.

23
Off Topic / Re: The greatest woman ever Died today
« on: October 06, 2020, 09:29 »
....or maybe she was excited to be serving under the first black POTUS, when it seemed our country had finally stepped into the 21st century, and the world was optimistic about the direction the U.S. was heading, and we all looked forward to the first female POTUS, and she wanted to be on the court when that happened. It would have been an exciting time for women, with HRC in the white house and RBG on the supreme court.

24
General Stock Discussion / Re: Moving to the U.S.; tax questions
« on: September 21, 2020, 12:24 »
typically royalties received from your work are reported as self-employment income

Yes, that's what I said.  Thanks.

No, you said they're reported as "regular" income. I consider "regular" income to be wages. When you use Turbotax it separates wages, reported on W-2, from royalties, reported on 1099. Wages and royalties (or self-employment income) are taxed differently.

25
General Stock Discussion / Re: Moving to the U.S.; tax questions
« on: September 21, 2020, 10:31 »
Microstock-based earnings will be reported as royalty income.

No they aren't.  They're reported as regular income.

You can find a tax table on the IRS site to give you a basic idea, or maybe even a calculator somewhere, to give you a general idea.  If I make $X, what is my tax rate?  That's disregarding costs and such, of course.

Just double-checked my Shutterstock 1099 from 2019, and my earnings are reported in box 2, "Royalties." I report my royalty income as royalties on my income tax returns. Because that's what they are.

"Although there is no blanket equation for royalty taxes, typically royalties received from your work are reported as self-employment income, and are taxed at a higher rate. You report these on Schedule C of IRS form 1040. If you earn more than $400 through self-employment, including royalties, you must report that income on your tax return."

https://money.howstuffworks.com/personal-finance/personal-income-taxes/what-is-royalty-income-and-how-is-it-taxed.htm

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