Well I for one can say that being on the front page of the most popular image can help sales of that image - I currently appear at the bottom of the highest rated of the last three months (only because the image was image of the week back in July). When the Most Popular page disappeared sales of that image slowed a fair bit. I've had another little rush of interest now it's back up there (I was expecting it to be bumped off by now - I think their three months must be running a bit slow)

No tarriffs here in Australia wherever you buy stuff from (there may be still some on motor vehicles some other things, but when Australia went free trade, they really did go free trade!). And Canon stuff is still largely made in Japan.

Transport is part of it - Australia is a small country population wise, but large in terms of size, so distribution networks are expensive to run here - lots of quasi- fixed costs that have to be spread over relatively small sales.
Another part of it is that elasticiyy of demand tends to be less elastic here. In Europe and Australia a large part of the market for digital camera gear - especially the high end stuff - is limited to the pro market, who will pay whatever they need to to get the job done. We don't have the large, wealthy, price aware consumer demand for top end gear that tends to keep the prices down (the differential between US and Australian prices for consumer grade photo gear tneds to be much lower in percentage terms than for L lenses...). Americans seem to be much more price conscious and shop around a lot more. So international companies do exactly what you would expect - they charge a higher price in the markets where they can do so and maintain their profits. If they try to do that in the US they would lose big sales from the consumers who buy pro quality gear. In other words we get ripped off because we still buy the stuff at the high prices...(well that's my theory and I'm sticking to it!)

Another part of the issue is that the fall in the US dollar relative to other currences still isn't really reflected in US prices (or the rise of the Australian currency in Australian prices) yet. Because of the relative volatility of international currrency markets and the sort of hedge deals that many big companies will have in place to stop them being burned by big currency movements it will take some time before price relativities reflect the changes in the exchange rates, if they ever do.

I've been caught by the texture that looks like artifacting too!  In the end (after a lengthy and animated correspondence with scout!) I decided to stop fighting that one - if it looks like artifacting to a third party without the actual object in front of them, then it might annoy buyers too. It's often possible to reshoot without the texture being so obvious and in the end that's what I did.

Not the only country in the world - Australia is the same (there's a specific right given for copyright of  wedding  and other "private or domestic purpose photographs to be owned by the person who commissions the photographs. This does not apply for commercial photography since 1998 when the Act was amended) I would think any sensible photographer in Australia and New Zealand has contracts that assign the copyright to the photographer explicitly - so you need to check the terms of the contract with the photographer who took the wedding shots.

(NB I'm not a lawyer!)

I'm Susan_Stewart on istock (I thought I mentioned that, but I obviously didn't!).    I think it's fair to say that I have been fairly critical of istock at times, especially over the current keywording issues, but I've never felt that I've been unfairly censored on istock's forums (either before or after turning exclusive) I'm always pretty careful to put a constructive slant on my criticisms, but if something isn't working I say so. They do tend to close down threads that have started going in circles, or threads which just say a paraphrase of "this site sucks", or have descended into personal invective. They don't allow discussion of individual rejections (except for constructive criticism in the critique forum)  - and I think that's also pretty fair enough. Whining about things like that on the forums isn't going to help anyone. (although the crazy scout queues tend to add to the tendency for people to complain). Given they are paying for the bandwidth and it's their sandbox I suppose  in the end they have the right to control discussion.

Personally I think for people starting out or with a large exisiting portfolio 15 would be pretty squeezy. And if I wasn't exclusive I think I'd be somewhat cheesed off - it would have been fairer in appearance if everyone including exclusives had a cut in uploads.

I rather think that in many ways istock have been victims of their own success . Many of their recent problems -poor implementation of the new search and keywording, the dreaded disambiguation, all sort of issues with poor communication, increasing queues all strike me as classic signs of a business which has outgrown its current organisational structure. It's very rapidly gone from a backyard operation to a multi million dollar operation which is a totally different ballgame. Hopefully they will get themselves through it.

 With the queues they are really caught between a rock and a hard place. You can't just magically produce new inspectors - they need training - and poorly trained inspectors reducing the queues quickly with arbitrary decisions would produce more complaints than long queues, I would have thought. So they can either have two or three week or more waiting periods or try to get people to cull their own images by making them think a bit harder about what to upload, by imposing limits. 

Not nice to anonymously comment on a guest book like that. It's also not nice to post other people's images on a forum for criticism/derision with no right of reply. But two wrongs don't make a right and neither behaviour can be condoned.