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.
Back in 2007 I was called on to place a value on a collection of wildlife stock images that were involved in a legal action. At the time I based the per-image value on the “average annual return-per-image” of the
Getty Images collection. By dividing the gross 2006 RM revenue by the total RM images in the collection I determined that the average annual gross license fee for an
RM image was $335.
PantherMedia is now representing the work of the largest provider of 360 °/VR media provider, 360Cities. 360 °/VR media are ideal for use in education, publishing, advertising and film, as well as in the development of mobile apps and games. 360Cities has been curating high-quality, fully 360 ° interactive panoramic photos for over 10 years, working with thousands of passionate VR photographers and videographers from around the world.
Yesterday, I received a call from a travel photographer who recently started contributing his work to Getty Images. He has about 200 images from various locations around the world in the collection. He just received a sales report for 3 Premium Access sales, each for
royalties of under $1.00. He wanted to know who he could contact at Getty about such ridiculously low royalties.
Did you know it takes Creatives twice as long to find an image that will work for their project as it did just 4 years ago? This is one of the facts that was uncovered in
Visualsteam’s Annual Survey of Creative Pros. This 35-page report is packed with other information and insights that should help image licensors and image creators as they plan for the future. The report can be purchased for $69.95 by contacting
fnyrf@ivfhnyfgrnz.pbz
Image creators need better information about the kind of content that is selling. Are customers looking at higher priced content? Can creators earn more money if their images are in a collection like Offset where images are licensed for much higher prices? Should creators produce more stills? Should they buy new equipment and start shooting video that sells for higher prices? Shutterstock’s
quarterly reports to investors aren’t very helpful in this regard.