Covid-19 has required everyone to re-think their business model and how they communicate with interested parties. Among the questions that footage professionals have are: How have they adapted to the exigencies of remote work? Is demand for archival content holding up? What can media companies do to fully unlock the commercial potential of their archival collections, and which technologies show the most promise in this evolution? See the webinar.
If photographers are serious about trying to earn a portion of their living from photography they should probably focus on producing video rather than still images. Or maybe when they organize a video shoot also shoot some still images of the same situations. Recently, I was talking to Cameron Gough of
Envato in Australia. He pointed out that the majority of the company’s earnings come from graphic related content and only about 10% to 20% of downloads are of still stock images. He also noted that video footage was the second highest type of content in demand without giving a percentage.
In March 2020, a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court
ruling held that Congress lacked authority to abrogate state’s sovereign immunity from infringement suits in the Copyright Remedy Clarification Act of 1990 (CRCA). When Congress passed the Copyright Remedy Clarification Act, it was responding to pressure from filmmakers like Rick Allen – as well as movie studios, software companies, and many other IP stakeholders – who said states were abusing sovereign immunity to avoid paying licensing fees.
Since the 1980s “The legal and political environment has been tilted substantially in favor of shareholders and against workers,” according to Lawrence H. Summers, former U.S. Treasury Secretary and president of Harvard, and Anna Stansbury a Phd candidate at Harvard University. This story discusses the way this principal has played out in the stork photo business.
The French publication
BBN Times has published a report outlining four reasons why businesses should use professionally produced photos rather than pictures shot by their employees or amateurs. To read the full story which is in English click
here.
Getty Images has passed along a keywording tip to its photographers who may be taking pictures related to Black Lives Matter.
What’s an image worth? Owen Franken sent me his image (shown below) of sliced duck in a Paris restaurant as it appears on the Getty Images website. The list price on Gettyimages.com for a large file is
$475 Euros. If all the customer needs is a very small file, only suitable for online use, the price is only 50 Euros. Getty licensed this image to a customer in Canada for
$0.14 and the photographer received
$0.03 for his work. The photographer’s royalty share of the gross sale price is 20% so actually the photographer was only entitled to $0.028, but in a moment of generosity Getty rounded the payment to the next highest cent.
After reading my story “
Copyright Protection For Photos Is Dead” Paul Melcher wrote, “If there is no more copyright, then there is no more licensing. If there is no more photo licensing then there is no more reason for the existence of ‘Selling Stock’"
Recently, I was asked to provide a list of some of the best agencies that license footage. I provided the following list and recommended that the videographer try to put the same clips with multiple agencies, non-exclusively, in order to maximize sales. Pond5, Shutterstock, AdobeStock, iStock, Dissolve and Storyblocks.
Mobistok in Hamburg, Germany has announces a new platform for licensing uses to stock images which puts power back into the hands of photographers. Anyone who shoots images with their smartphones can go to Mobistok to put their imagery up for sale. While many stock photo websites make it a bit more difficult for individuals to sell their photos, Mobistok has been created from the ground up as a seamless way to sell photos and videos.