Many Getty photos embeddable free of charge

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My concerns are thus:

  1. Getty reserves the right to advertise in this player…depending on your editorial slant, that could be a nightmare, and of course you get zilch so far in that.

  2. They could also pull the plug on this. If you rely heavily on it and they decide your site or the whole solution is not to their liking…your site could essentially be one giant set of broken image links.

  3. Once again we’re pushing forward the idea that the entire Internet is one giant ad service. Why pay for anything, because after all, we’re all the product these days? What happens when we have a correction in the ad rate market and possibly a collapse. Google has been reporting drops in ad rates for a couple years now.

  4. Bit concerned at the terms that of course state they can do tracking and so can third parties. Use an image of theirs…what level of tracking does this involve?

  5. What does this say about the value of art…once again we’re boiling it down to everything is free and nothing has value outside ad revenue.

  6. A change in terms at any time could screw millions of people, but hey, that’s nothing new.

  7. What will this do to other stock image startups or companies that can’t compete with free?

On the other hand, we’ve again come down to the lessor of two evils. On one hand at least they aren’t suing anyone, but on the other hand what will this look like down the road? This is clearly a shot against Google Images. The question I have…is what will their photogs get on the ad rev and did they know this was coming?

So positive or negative, too early to say…anyone else?

An embedded player for a simple image? As someone who appreciates technology let me say this: Barf.

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It also seems to be a big advert for them considering that that’s what we click through to. That cat photo is worth 450$ - I bet you couldn’t get that for the cat itself.

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Screw Getty and their copyright extortion letters.

I would never use any of their images even for free as they have a bad habit of going after people who have licensed images or going after people for images that Getty actually dose not own.

What about the three fishies and the bowl!!?!

But seriously, as someone who buys stock photos on the regular, I never buy from Getty unless I need something hyper-specific and historical, because their prices are so high. I don’t buy for the web, rather for print, so it’s apples and oranges really.

I agree with you, it’s a great big ad for Getty Images. See, we’re all talking about it, so add a tick-mark to the ROI column.

No joke. Remember the days of one website hotlinking someone else’s image? The original site owner would change the image, but keep the name, and suddenly an unsuspecting person (who likely didn’t even understand what was going on) had goatse or a don’t-steal-my-pictures image on their site? Ah, the early web… sigh. I can’t believe I’ve been at this for 15 years.

This can’t possibly end with bait-and-switch, can it?

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Use is noncommercial only, but they’re OK with ad-supported editorial use.

I don’t know how agencies work: does the photographer get a say in this?

Hypothetically, I’d be entirely happy with non-commercial use (though I’d prefer some control - I wouldn’t want an anti-windfarm campaign group to use my photos of wind turbines, for example) but I’m not happy about editorial use on an ad-supported site.

I think Getty buys the image from the Photographer, so they don’t get a say in how it is used anymore. This is a feature, because nobody wants to have some Photographer calling them up and demanding they stop using their photo because they don’t believe in your company or something–after you have printed up half a million flyers and put up billboards and whatnot. That kind of headache is why stock photos exist in the first place.

From what I understand…and this also goes for Getty’s music licensing biz…you grant them the rights which basically means you lose the right to say anything…and for that I believe you get 35% of whatever they license it for…but as far as this new thing…they must have to compensate artists…and if this becomes ad supported, will the artist get 35% of the ad rev? And is that impressions, clicks?

Well, your loss. You’ll find hardly any other funny cat images available on the Internet.

I’m not a stock photographer, but I am a photographer and I’m familiar with the basic business model…

As I recall, Getty operates by licensing shots from photographers, putting them into it’s database, and then selling them to folks who are in need of stock photos. The photographers get a stupidly low cut of the take.

The terms of what you sign when you add stuff to their business let them get away with doing a lot of stuff with your photos that may well be in /their/ best interest but very much against yours. Last year, for example, they made a deal with Google that completely screwed over the photogs but gave Getty a crapton of money. ( http://petapixel.com/2013/01/16/google-strikes-controversial-licensing-deal-with-getty-images/ )

They’re one of the biggest stock photo companies, and also one of the most terrible.

8 - I cannot add a large white w/black outline caption to the picture of the kitty on the Internet, meaning that it is not really a picture of a kitty on the Internet.

Does this mean that my ad-blocker will shortly start blocking images too? My noscript already blocks half the internet.

This is a chance I’m willing to take.

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