You may have seen references to the “Monkey Selfie” and Wikimedia’s claim that there can be no copyright on the photo. Wikimedia claims it can use the photo without any licensing because it was the monkey that took the photo. Photographer David Slater supplied the equipment the monkey used and made the image available to the world. (The monkey hasn’t figured out how to use the Internet yet.) Get more information about the copyright debate.
Blend Images and
Danita Delimont Stock Photography have recently joined the
IMGembed community. IMGembed went live in March 2013 and currently has millions of images in its collection. Previously, we have reported on
Getty’s embedding strategy and PressFoto’s
ImageRent. IMGembed offers another approach to the pay-per-view strategy for monetizing images.
Google has just made it much easier for searchers to find images they can legally use for FREE – even for commercial uses. Bing introduced this feature last July. Go to Google. Use the images search feature and search for any subject. Click on “Search Tools” and under that click on “Usage Rights.” The default search is “not filtered by license,” but the searcher can change that to any one of the following:
Many Internet users seem to believe that it is OK to use any image they find online for wallpaper on their site. The next step is to grab a bunch of images they like and create a site that makes the images available to others for free wallpaper use. And, once they’ve gone to the trouble to create a site the site owners figure they might as well make a little money by selling a few ads.
Dreamstime just released the following to the press cautioning image user to be careful about grabbing images off the Internet because they could be “violating someone’s copyright.” To aid users in protecting themselves Dreamstime offers a collection of images at
Stockfreeimages.com.
In the growing clamor and uproar about the free images available through Google Drive Rick Becker-Leckrone, CEO of Blend Images, made some points on the
Stockphoto blog that are worth examining. See the
previous article for more background.
Sean Locke (one of iStock’s highest earning contributors) discovered recently that some of his best selling images are now available on GoogleDrive for
FREE. There is a major thread in the
iStock forum. I’ll try to summarize what seems to be known so far.
Is it possible to earn money by giving your images away for Free? With Stipple the answer is Yes! 40% of searches on the Internet today happen outside of search engines like Google. People discover what they are looking for via blogs, Tweets, Facebook and in general, just browsing around. With Stipple when they find your image they can also find you.
In March 2011 we published
a brief story about how Noam Galai’s picture of his screaming face had been used extensively all over the world without his permission. The image has gained a reputation as the “Stolen Scream.” But, was it really stolen or did the photographer effectively allow the uses.
Travel photographers take note.
Wikimedia Commons thinks there are not enough free images available on the web. So they are running a contest to build their image database that already contains 13.6 million photos and illustrations.