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.
On January 10, 2013 he started a thread on the iStock forum entitled “
Google Stealing Images, or Another ‘Deal,” to see if other iStock contributors knew anything about this. So far the thread has over 400 angry posts and no clear explanation. I’ll try to summarize what seems to be known so far.
In April Google launched Google Drive and in August
Google announced that they had created a gallery of stock photos that could be freely used in documents and presentation by Google Drive customers. Google also asked it’s users to help “curate” the photos that would be made available in this collection by going to
www.thinkstock.com and submit image numbers for up to 10 photos that they would like to see included in the collection.
Google would then use the recommendations to create a gallery of over 6,000 images that any Google Drive customer can “
freely use.”
All customers have to do is go to
https://drive.google.com and create a new document. Then press "insert" and select "image". In the dialog, pick "Search" and "Stock Photo". Once you have selected an image it appears in your document at 1,066 x 1,600 resolution. Initially,the image creator was not identified on the images Locke found. There is No attribution, No meta-data attached to the file, No license, and No link.
However, Locke has now been able to download all 6923 images available on Google. He has provided a link to a
text list of the exif data that includes the Getty Images file numbers and many photographer names. In a number of cases the photographer is not identified. Locke has also put together a
file that shows thumbnails of all the images along with the ID numbers and photographer names in many cases.
Google’s link about copyright says, "When using the Google Image Search feature in Google Docs, your results will be filtered to include images labeled with a license that allows you to copy the image for commercial purposes and modify it in ways specified in the license."
What’s Google’s Deal With ThinkStock?
It appears that Getty has made a deal with Google that allows them to select whatever image they want and for a one time fee make that image freely available to all Google Drive customers for unlimited use, in any manner, forever.
So what is that one-time fee?
iStock photographer “Gmutlu” found some of his Photographer’s Choice images in the Google Drive collection and when he checked his Getty statements he found the following sale:
Product Type: Premium Access Time Limited
Customer Name: Google eCommerce & Google Drive
Gross Royalty (in USD): $12.00
Photographer “Imgorthand” found 2 sales on his Getty Images 31-Oct-12 sales report for a total of $24.00. So it looks like Getty photographers, at least, can expect to receive $12 whenever Google acquires one of their images. It is unclear what the iStock contributors are receiving.
The “Imgorthand” images were from iStock’s Vetta premium priced collection. Many of Sean Locke’s images were also Vetta images.
Photographer “guenterguni” pointed out that a Vetta file downloaded from GoogleDrive for free would have cost him $107.50 if he had purchased it from iStock in Europe. And, of course, he is only one of many people who may be using that image.
A high percentage of the GoogleDrive images are from iStock exclusive photographers, but there are also some of Yuri Arcurs images and he is non-exclusive with iStock. One of Chelsea Kedron’s images (96432957) from Getty’s Flickr collection is also found on GoogleDrive. The list price for that image on Getty at a file size of 1025 x 1025 px is $260 (or 225 British Pounds which is even higher). Chelsea will get $12 for unlimited use by multiple customers of this image.
What’s Getty Have To Say?
So what’s Getty have to say about all this? Claudia Micare, Getty’s manager of Contributor Relations said yesterday, “now I am working with iStock. There is so much conjecture here that I am afraid the string is more confusing than anything else so I wanted to ask that you hold on any more assumptions. As soon as we have all of the information we need we will post it for you. Yes it is not great that we didn't have this information ahead of it launching. New kinds of opportunities are happening very quickly these days, but we should have had this information earlier, that is not even a debate and we are working on this too in the background.??“When we post the detail there will be a lot to talk about I am sure. Questions and observations are fine but to avoid confusion and misinformation we should stick to the facts we have now. We are working on getting you more as we speak.”
Later yesterday Claudia posted, “We will come back on this tomorrow. Clearly there are a lot of questions that need answering and a lot to explore here. I just wanted to let you know that we will need at least several more hours to give you the clear picture and information, solutions etc. We know you are waiting so no more reminders are needed about the fact that you are waiting.”
So far they have been unable or unwilling to supply an explanation.
One photographer pointed out that during
another crisis, Rebecca Rockafellar, iStock General Manager, said, “I don’t expect I can reassure everyone here that we have your best interests at heart, but we do. That’s because our interests are aligned – when iStock is successful we’re all successful.”