The United States Copyright Office of the Library of Congress has published a final rule establishing adjusted fees for copyright registration. The new fee structure will go into effect on May 1, 2014. The fee for an application filed online will increase from $35 to $55. The fee for an application filed on paper will increase from $65 to $85.
Be careful what you write in your blog. It’s not private. Over the weekend I received a request from a former mid-level employee of a stock agency who wanted me to delete from our Selling Stock archive a story that was published in 2009.
PACA’s mission has always been to support a healthy and sustainable market for licensing the use of photographic images, as well as to encourage and support innovative ways for photography to be legally used in the rapidly changing marketplace. Clearly, models for licensing of photography have had a difficult time keeping pace with changes brought on by the Internet, social media, and the blogosphere.
The informal corporate motto for Google is “Don’t be evil.” This motto is sometimes incorrectly stated as Do no evil. But the company’s
image search tool facilitates and
encourages theft. The same is basically true of Bing and Yahoo.
After many years, the Ninth Circuit finally entered a decision in the Alaska Stock, LLC v. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company (HMH) case. In Anchorage U.S. District Judge H. Russel Holland had originally tossed the federal lawsuit after finding that the photographs had been improperly registered with the Copyright Office.
A reader asked if anyone produces a list of the stock photography subjects that are in greatest demand. As far as I know such a list does not exist. In very general terms the subjects in greatest demand are model released people in business and family situations, but to be useful it is necessary to get much more specific.
StockFood has released a new collection of food images that points to a new trend in food photography, and to a certain extent in stock photography as a whole. They call their collection “
Perfectly Imperfect” which describes the spirit of spontaneity that is increasingly in demand in every type of photography.
In all the excitement about 35 million FREE images it is worth looking back at some of things that have been happening at Getty Images in the last three months. After watching revenue decline for the fifth straight quarter, and many of its top producers cut back on production or stop supplying new images altogether, Getty evidently decided that their turn-around strategy wasn’t working and they needed to make some radical changes.
Carlyle Group should be trying to sell Getty’s Midstock division (iStock, Thinkstock and Photos.com) to Shutterstock before the value of that segment of Getty’s business collapses. Carlyle should recognize by now that Getty Images has been a bad investment. It is the time to cut losses.
The German microstock agency PantherMedia (
http://www.panthermedia.net), a German microstock agency with 28 million images in its collection, has relaunched its new website with the most comprehensive update in 10 years. Besides the clear new design, the website offers new products, new licences and additional features.