TwitPic - As Expected! Selling YOUR Photos

It comes as little surprise that TwitPic announced they are now licensing images that photographers transmit over the TwitPic service. They, of course, have the right to do so, and we stand by the position we first put forth when we wrote about it last year (Morel v. AFP, AFP v. Morel - Which Way Blows the Wind?, 10/5/2010).

The model continues - 'offer a free service, or a limited one, build up a critical mass of users, change (or enforce existing) terms, and then aggregate the users' content for profit and gain.'

The New York Times reported here, and Photo District News wrote both 'Time to Quit Using TwitPic?' (5/23/11) and 'Twitpic: Laundering Images of Owners’ Rights' (5/24/11) about the realities of how the "free" model is affecting your intellectual property.

South Park has a hilarious show on the issue whereby no one actually reads terms of service here, as always, taking the issue to it's absurd endgame.

This just underscores the reality that there really is NOTHING that is free. While something may appear free, you are always giving something up when you accept something for free. Time, privacy, or, in this case, your rights.

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PicScout Acquired by Getty Images

Getty Images has made an interesting acquisition in buying the PicScout image recognition service a few weeks ago, and frankly, it's a smart move. Getty Images, with millions of images, and a dwindling per image revenue stream, must find alternative revenue streams, and focusing on infringements is wise.

In 2007, when Getty was publicly traded, and had to do things like conference calls with investors, Getty CEO Jonathan Klein said "the way we see the world today quite simply, is that our core stock photography business has stopped growing, in fact, it's declining. Our number 1 priority is to stabilize that business...we're trying to stablize the core stock business, at the same time, trying continuing to grow the other businesses." (PBN - GYI's JDK: "our core stock photography business has stopped growing, in fact, it's declining.", 9/20/07). So, the new business seems to be pursuing infringements?

Also back in September of 2007, the Stock Artists Alliance released a white paper - “Infringements of Stock Images and Lost Revenues.”, that they did with....wait for it....Pic Scout, revealed some interesting figures. We wrote (God Save the Alliance, 9/07), "SAA’s study found that 9 out of 10 images they found were infringements upon RM images. That’s a lot of infringements! What’s worse, because of the low-dollar-per-image issue, it seems that tracking infringements of RF isn’t cost effective, giving infringers essentially a “license” to infringe." We also cited from the report back in 2007 "According to Selling Stock’s recent count, there are just over 1 million RM images on gettyimages.com. If we apply the 1:15 annual infringement rate observed in our study, we arrive at an estimate of approximately 67,000 infringements in a one –year period."

PicScout certainly is the industry leader when it comes to image recognition. They also are the provider of image recognition services to the PLUS Coalition's PLUS Registry, which positions not just PicScout, but also Getty Images, to lead the industry in the long term.

Frankly, all photographers would benefit from Getty being on top of their rights management, and the pursuit of infringers. The more infringers are pursued, the more they will think twice infringing, whether it's a Getty image, or that of a freelancer.

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