with EIN you are also obliged to file a tax return every year.

That's what IRS told me:
"The choice as to whether to use an Employer Identification Number (EIN), or Individual Taxpayer Identification Number (ITIN), is up to you. Whichever number you use would dictate how the payments are made out, when paid. Your concern over establishing a filing requirement if you choose and EIN is valid. If an EIN is assigned, there is normally a filing requirement established. With the tax, if any, being satisfied at source because of the correct amount of withholding, if required, there would be no need to file a return unless you were claiming withholding back, or you had another item of income that required reporting. However, once the number (EIN) has been assigned, an automatic process is set up which would require that you file a return for that EIN number. You would then have to notify the IRS that you did not have a filing requirement for that year, and also remove future filing requirements. If you obtained the ITIN, then the correct amount would be withheld, if any, at source and there would be no need to file a return, unless there was a claim for withholding back or you had additional items of income that required reporting. To summarize, once the W-8BEN is in place, if there is any withholding required it will be at the correct rate. Your tax obligation, if any, would have been satisfied, and you would not need to file. However, the EIN assignment triggers an automatic process, that will entail a notice requesting a return if we do not get one from you for your business."

The issue is that DT has recently started to reject images that are just similar but are very far from being "nearly identical".

I am trying to avoid similar images in my uploads, but I also saw that a few times.

There is absolutely no way that a sale made in Europe, using a European contributor, is subject to this particular American tax, Shutterstock checked this with both their legal team and American revenue, and subsequently split all sales on their web site so that American tax is only charged to American clients.. it does sound a little complicated, but for obvious reasons if both the buyer and the uploader are located in Europe, Europe has it's own trading laws that apply, and American revenue have nothing to do with that sale as regards withholding tax at least..

The key part here is "European contributor". The formal way to declare that is to fill form W-8BEN. If isn't filled in, Fotolia assume you are a US contributor and withdraws corresponding US tax.

And yes, Fotolia also split all sales to US vs non-US, and as I just mentioned in my previous post I do see it working - the tax is only applied to the US sales.

a good point is made in the neighbor thread - if Fotolia persists on ITIN they will have to male paper letters to everyone; and this wouldn't be cheap when multiplied thousands times.

this time from South Africa

at least they are not anonymous - show address and phone nr on their website
website already translated to several languages

But sending invitation email from a gmail address - come on! Not very professional.

If anybody wants to spend time with it let us know I am not going to bother.

down for me too

Perhaps many new contributors (and no entry exam) is the reason?

for me both this year and a year ago the number of istock sales in Jan was almost the same as December.

FL is solid #3 for me for the last few months (after SS and IS); and in average it's growing lately comparing with the previous couple years (that were rather low and flat).

My December sales in FL is about the same as November.

Come on guys! For traditional stocks it takes months to clear payments and you complain when it's longer than a week

I am being asked by DT about such images, and so far I disabled a few. I don't bother going and disabling old images on my own, only do that when prompted by DT.

From the beginning I have "SR-EL license" completely disabled for all my photos on  DT and I am not planning to enable it.

"Why use agencies other than shutterstock?"

Because SS brings me 25-30% of my monthly microstock income, and other agencies (combined) bring the remaining 70-75%.

Remark: my portfolio is about 1400 photos; and it's too early to make any conclusions until you get 400-500 photos online...