Getty Images has announced that it will be transitioning all of its creative stock photography offerings to a Royalty Free licensing model and ditching Rights Managed licensing entirely—a move that will be more convenient for customers, but worse for photographers.
A company called Icons8 has just released "a massive free resource of 100k faces generated from scratch" using an AI algorithm trained on tens of thousands of real-life portraits. The resulting headshots can be used by anybody, royalty free, without worrying about model releases or other stock photography issues, since a fake person can't exactly sue you.
If you sell your photography as stock shots with royalty free licenses through services such as Getty Images, you need to be okay with buyers using the images in ways that seem disproportionate to the meager price they paid. That's a lesson Turkish photographer Murat Koc learned this past week after discovering his photo used as a wallpaper on a newly launched laptop.
In an attempt to potentially flip the imaging licensing market on its head, Pixels.com has launched a new platform that puts the photographers in control for a change. By allowing image creators to manage every aspect of the process -- from prices, to what the license entails -- they're hoping to completely change who holds the power in the image licensing marketplace.
Photographer Remi Thornton recently terminated his contract with Getty after finding out that the agency was allowing online retailer CafePress to use his images on potential merchandise without paying an up-front licensing fee.
In fact, according to Thornton, CafePress has an exclusive agreement with Getty, which allows them use any of the agency's Royalty Free stock to populate their store, while only paying the photographer if the merchandise featuring their image actually sells.