The largest
photo agency in the world admits defeat against piracy but look ahead,
releasing nearly half of its archive. The new mechanism will provide the
possibility of incorporating a photo on the internet with an embedding tool.
"We
have failed to stop piracy - admits Craig Peters, senior vice president of
Getty Images - websites, blogs , social networks: anyone can become an editor
with images taken on the Internet with a simple right click of mouse button.
Many do it in good faith because they do not know the rules of copyright.
Others do not care. Moreover finding images without the watermark is easy, just
go to Google or Bing and make a screenshot . " The parallel is close to
what happened to music before the arrival of the free streaming services5: to
provide users an opportunity of using, more convenient, fast and above all
legal beautiful images.
But further ahead, Getty says it will
evaluate how to develop the embedding tool. Some of the options for what it
could do include adding advertising overlays, paid features, sharing limits and
extending it to video. All possibilities, or not — it all depends on how people
take to the endeavor.
“Out of the gate we are launching with a
link-back and attribution, and we will evaluate monetisation in the
downstream,” Peters says, “including how and what ways and over time you might
develop alternative revenue models around it. We don’t have a plan to
definitively monetise.”
To be clear, Getty already brings in a
healthy amount of revenues from blogs like TechCrunch and others who pay (not
small) license fees to use its photography and videos. The picture I used here,
for example, to illustrate how the embed tools look, has license fees that
range from £25 to £579, depending on the size.
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