Quote from: cthoman on September 17, 2013, 11:43

Good luck enforcing that. You'd need a full time staff just doing that. 

Hmmm. Must admit if I had friends or family who owned SSTK stock then I'd certainly be keeping them appraised of how I thought the business might be doing in relation to my own earnings. Who wouldn't?

Quote from: Freedom on September 17, 2013, 11:14

The part that you cannot talk about your own earning does not seem to be fair.

It's because SS are now a publically traded company and therefore have to comply with regulations.

Significant changes to your own earnings for example could be deemed 'insider information' so they don't want contributors blabbing about it all over the internet. It might lead to a situation in which some traders have information, that could affect the share price, that others do not.

90 day turnaround - maybe something to do with them not having exclusivity? Or are they seeing a lot of contributors selling rights on other sites and asking for removal of their images from SS? It would be interesting to see what happens in a case whereby you sell the rights and therefore have to remove the image from all other sites. Would the 90 day turnaround with SS stop the sale?

I think someone had raised the issue of enforceability earlier. It is unlikely they are going to police the whole community, but they can terminate you for cause by citing the confidentiality clause, especially in a situation when one contributor causes some real discomfort like Sean did at IS.

It is dangerous.

The only thing that worries me is the social media marketing, if the images are not watermarked. The reactions below the TOS article state that images are available for grabs at a pretty high resolution. SS should try to prevent image theft by watermarking or showing smaller images, or both.

The request not to talk about earnings is fine by me. Most people aren't keen on telling what they are earning anyway. I believe you can still mention your total earnings, but not to publicly disclose more specific details about the number of SDs or ODs. I think it's good to be a little secretive about it, since any of SS's competitors may use the information to devise new strategies to compete with SS, which could turn out bad for us.

Quote from: Noedelhap on September 17, 2013, 12:19

The only thing that worries me is the social media marketing, if the images are not watermarked. The reactions below the TOS article state that images are available for grabs at a pretty high resolution. SS should try to prevent image theft by watermarking or showing smaller images, or both.

The request not to talk about earnings is fine by me. Most people aren't keen on telling what they are earning anyway. I believe you can still mention your total earnings, but not to publicly disclose more specific details about the number of SDs or ODs. I think it's good to be a little secretive about it, since any of SS's competitors may use the information to devise new strategies to compete with SS, which could turn out bad for us.

This is what the TOS says " including but not limited to royalty rates, royalty payments and earnings data".  Total earnings would seem to fit under earnings data but that doesn't really matter because it's not limited to those things listed, there are other unknown things you can't talk about.

It is important for artists to share information to see which sites are worth contributing to. If I hadn't read how successful people are at SS I would not have even considered working with a subscription site.

If they really start policing us on external forums or people get their accounts closed because they decided to share what they earn, if they reached a new royalty level etc...then it will probably be necessary to use an alias for the sales threads.

But maybe this is also related to people like Yuri who have huge volumes of sales and can actually track how SS is doing overall. Nobody can gain any insight into how SS is doing from my data.

But I really can't believe they are suddenly worried by the sales threads on msg, blogs or facebook groups.

I don't see a problem with the wait on a portion of your portfolio - we already accepted it with DT years ago (although if you remember they originally proposed 12 months no exceptions and we stopped uploading and fussed and they changed it to 6 months). I don't like it, but I can see that as they're dealing with larger companies as clients they need to accommodate more of these types of requests - grab the comp now and buy in a month or two.

I wish they would be more forthcoming about what exactly happens with these premier customers. What makes a customer premier; how many unwatermarked comps (at what size) can they have for how long without purchasing anything before SS will audit them to see what they're up to; do these higher prices paid for the premier customers who get unwatermarked comps show up in higher royalties for contributors when they do buy? Does that show up as a single and other download? Do they offer unwatermarked comps on subscriptions (one would think not, but as I had no idea they were even offering such a service, it makes me wonder how this works).

I wasn't comfortable when they introduced the Single and Other Downloads that they wouldn't give us any information about the price the customer paid or what the license terms were. I'm still not happy (but not unhappy enough to walk away from SS) as it may or may not be a good deal for us - the numbers can be high (yesterday I had one for $82.50 which was great, but I have no idea what I sold for that amount) but we can't know if we're being ripped off or fairly compensated. Finding out about these other Premier customers with special rates just adds to this concern that they are not being transparent enough with contributors about what terms they sell our content on.

Our content, not theirs, and we can't see the terms of the sales (other than subscriptions, enhanced licenses and on demand).

As far as not discussing earnings, they post an earnings schedule with royalty rates - how can we not discuss publicly what they post on their web site? The full section in the new TOS says:

Confidentiality
By submitting any Content to Shutterstock, you acknowledge that you will acquire certain confidential information, including but not limited to royalty rates, royalty payments and earnings data (collectively, "Confidential Information"). Confidential Information shall not be disclosed to any third party other than representatives, agents, attorneys, accountants, auditors and advisors with a bona fide need to know, who shall first agree to keep the terms confidential.

I might also argue that as fellow contributors have a need to know about rising or falling monthly earnings, it'd be fine to keep discussing it. However, that's a stretch and as they can terminate my account at any time for pretty much any reason, I'm a little concerned that this might give them an excuse. Section 3.a. about termination of our accounts for various reasons ends "..., or for convenience."

People are always writing about guesstimates of public companies' earnings and whether they're on the rise or fall. I don't see why writing about how well (or not) SS is doing is suddenly not acceptable.

I don't talk about my monthly totals in $$ in forums, but I don't like being told I can't

I'm not thrilled at the Facebook and other social media section not making any mention of steps they would take - such as watermarking our content - to prevent theft when "marketing" our work this way. I hope that they would, but  I think they should say so.