Articles by Jim Pickerell
With its “Copyright in the Digital Single Market”
directive the European Parliament took a giant step last week toward empowering creatives and news publisher to negotiate with the Internet giants for a share of the revenue received as a result of their distribution of creative content they do not own. The new copyright rules also contain safeguards on freedom of expression.
Rick Strange, a very successful UK travel photographer with over 45 years experience is closing his
www.worldtravelphotographs.com website after over 4 years of very disappointing sales. Considering the excellent quality of his work, this may be a cautionary tale for any photographer considering trying to market work from a personal website rather than using a stock agency.
On April 1, 2019,
StockFood GmbH will take over the German travel photo agency Look. All employees, including their long-standing customer advisors and photo editors, will join the StockFood team. For decades, Look (
lookphotos.com) has been known as the leading German travel photo agency. From the very beginning, the name "Look" has been synonymous with the group's mission.
PhotoShelter, the leading digital asset management platform for visual storytellers, today announced two dynamic additions to the company’s management team: Kristine Muccigrosso and Daniel Salerno. Muccigrosso joins as the VP of Customer Success and Salerno as the Director of Talent and People Operations.
The Japanese microstock agency PIXTA which purchased Topic, a South Korean premium stock agency a couple years ago, has decided to make a business alliance with OGQ Co.,Ltd. in their "Naver OGQ Market." Naver is Korea's version of Yahoo or Google. The sales price for each image use will be 200 South Korean Won. This is equivalent to about
$0.18 in U.S. dollars.
Two unanimous opinions of the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday, March 4, make winning a copyright infringement case more difficult. See a full report on the Digital Media Licensing Association website
here.
Huawei is using
photos created with a DSLR to promote their new P30 Smartphone Pro Camera rather than photos actually taken with the camera. This is the third time they have been caught using DSLR stock photos to promote the use of their smartphones. They seem to have no qualms about misrepresenting their products to the public and potential buyers.
Getty Images sent out the following notice to image suppliers yesterday. Be sure to also see
Getty Simplifying RM Exclusivity where I analyze the pros and cons of this plan for image creators. They said, "We will soon begin including a base level of Exclusivity into RM licenses called Market Freeze, which will allow customers exclusive use of an image for the combination of use, industry, geography, and duration of any commercial use license."
Will Getty’s move to simplifying RM Exclusivity be good for Image Creators? The following are several things RM contributors should think about. In particular, contributors who have co-exclusive agreements with Getty should question this new deal. See
Getty To Push Exclusive RM for the full release on this new program
Getty Images personnel are telling some stock agency image suppliers that in 3 to 5 years there will be no more Rights Managed licensing. Everything will be RF. Currently, only 21% of the images in Getty’s Creative collection are RM. That is down from
55% in 2007, the last time Getty supplied detailed figures on gross sales of the various collections. Getty is also putting pressure on individual photographers to switch their RM images to RF.