Photographers Roger Ressmeyer, Richard Minden and 82 other named complainants have filed a copyright infringement suit against Getty Images in the Eastern District of New York. The plaintiffs allege that licensing their rights-managed images as part of Getty's Premium Access subscription product is a violation of existing contractual agreements.
Corbis predicts still-image sales will decline only slightly by 2012. However, this is no reason to be sanguine, as the same total will be divided differently among various industry segments. In addition, this analysis was completed during the summer, prior to the more recent economic disruption.
During a weekend seminar at PhotoPlus Expo in New York, Corbis has announced that it will adjust rights-managed photographers' royalty rates downward "to harmonize its royalties with industry norms." Company CEO Gary Shenk also told
Selling Stock that Corbis recorded a profit during the last quarter.
When talking about microstock, most traditional stock photographers like to say, "You can never make money selling pictures for $1.00!" The data from
Selling Stock's recent survey and other available industry information tends to explode that myth.
Stock photography is licensed in several ways. Of 238 respondents to the recent
Selling Stock survey, 179 licensed some work as rights-managed, and 37 licensed under Getty Images' rights-ready model. Stock income reported was usually less than the respondents' total income, because many photographers earned some revenue from sources other than stock.
The first thing to consider when reviewing the results of the
Selling Stock income survey is the degree to which these figures represent the total community of individual stock-image producers.
Stock shooters who also do assignment work earn as much from it as from stock, but their average income from stock is much lower than the overall stock-revenue average. In addition, footage producers emerge as overall revenue winners.
The economic downturn is likely to hit traditional stock shooters hard. Advertising theory says that when sales go down, it is important to increase advertising spending in order to increase market share. Combined with the possibility of assignment budgets moving toward stock, some professional photographers hope that advertisers will buy more images. This is highly unlikely.
Selling Stock's self-employed photographer income survey accounts for close to $33 million in revenues generated by 238 respondents from 19 countries.
When Photolibrary acquired IndexStock in late 2006, it took on the obligation of paying contributors all they were owed by the previous owners. To date, Photolibrary has paid out $1.96 million to 632 individual photographers. (All pre-acquisition monies owed to third-party suppliers have also been paid.) One of Photolibrary's first moves was to pay all contributors the amounts owed for sales booked in the six months prior to acquisition.