Recently, a case where a photographer donated a huge cache of images to the library of congress to become public domain has come to haunt Getty Images. 

Carol M Highsmith is currently suing Getty Images for US$ 1 billion dollars in damages. After she was sued by Getty Images for copyright infringement over her own photos that she donated to the US Library of Congress. In her gift, those photos has become royalty free but Getty Images thought they could misappropriate it and sue her instead. 

This is not the first time such public domain images are being used by Getty in licensing suits. A number of royalty free images from the Library of Congress has ended up in Getty's own coffers and you can actually buy them. 

This has made photographers world wide very incensed at the thought that Getty and Alamy prefer to sell public domain pictures and keep 100 percent of the profits. 

This isn't a bad business model. Take something for free and sue the pants out of people who use them. 

In the world today, are are millions of images being captured digitally every day of week. Many will end up in stock image libraries like Getty and Alamy which will never be sold because too few buyers are turning to them. 

The race to the bottom to sell bulk digital images with subscriptions has decimated the worth of digital photos and yet, Alamy and Getty prefer to list public domain pictures as a way to sell even more picture albeit scalping a clean profit for themselves. 

Such brazen thievery is no different than the many who steal photos off the Internet for commercial use. 

But that's not all, lately Getty has decided to kill its photojournalism department by declaring it doesn't want to keep photographers engaged in reportage work will no longer be getting further assignments from them. 

Reportage work was the bread and butter of photojournalism in its heyday, Today, photojournalism assignments are farmed out to anyone willing to work for beer money. 

I have images listed on Getty and it and not seen a single licensing sale from them, giving me reason to suspect they are more interested to selling photos where they make a bigger profit than those who are listed as royalty free on their library. 

But the rush to the bottom by royalty free image agencies are making the business more and more difficult to justify. 

We all know that you can buy an image for a song on some of these sites and it is a sign of desperation for photographers who want their work purchased. 

Getty has been in hot soup lately, making several of such misappropriations from photographers and later suing them for copyright infringement only to be counter sued by the photographer and copyright owner instead. 

Getty Fights Lawsuit Update

In the ongoing litigation between Getty and Carol Highsmith, the image agency has told the court that Carol's images in public domain is free and cannot be infringed so their argument is that Carol cannot sue them for copyright infringement since no protection exist for them. 

For charging people for public domain pictures, Getty had this to add. 

“Public domain works are routinely commercialized,” writes Getty. “Publishers charge money for their copies of Dickens novels and Shakespeare plays, etc.” That, claims Getty, is what they’re doing with Highsmith’s work, and it’s totally legal. 

So what they are saying is that you should never put ANY images up into public domain because Getty has the right to misappropriate it and sell them online for a fee. 

Told you this can't end well. 

This just in. Alamy has revised its contributor agreement after receiving stinging criticism in regard to how it pursues copyright infringements. The original terms were sent in February and was all ready to go live in April, 2015. But photographers started to protest some of the amendments to the previous terms and this started the ball rolling for a change. Shooting stock is a very difficult trade. You can spend thousands shooting images which you hope to sell only to see a similar offering for Royalty Free licensing. 

Contacting the customer to check on copyright usage was one of the critical issues that led to an amendment. On the left hand side is the original usage and contributor agreement terms and on the left, you have the amendment. 

In the original revised terms sent to contributors in February, 2015. Alamy wanted photographers to stay the hell away from customers. I mean, who wants their customers hounded by photographers? Unfortunately, this didn't go well with contributors who say that Alamy just wants to protect copyright abusers by buying the least costly license for a photo and using it verbatim on every single imaginable print and web collateral. 

The problem is still Alamy's stand is on its own pursuant of the copyright infringer. Here, it is closely worded to imply that if they do take action, the nett amount recovered from the offender will be first used to pay of its own legal team before handing any residual amount due to you. 

In other words, if you spend most of your time combing the net for people who use your photos without paying, then you could ranking a huge bill of your own. Apparently, Alamy will have to determine if the offending party was a client or customers of Alamy when this all happens. No where does it say that it will pursue the offender for leaked images. 

How does a Photo Leak into the Mainstream?

Alamy has a distributor network, who in turn help to market your photos to countries where it is not reaching out to. It is through here that the leaks will happen. High resolution images could be passed on for customer validation and rejected, and later used in customers collaterals. But Alamy also has its own preferred client list, who may in turn have those photos picked out, paid for and later used in other marketing collaterals where the original licensing does not cover. 

For example, for print use and for web use. People can easily scale a web quality for use on print. It's not rocket science. This is done on a everyday basis for photos which do not have the resolution to meet the demands of the print industry. 

Just because someone buys a medium quality image for use does not mean it can't be upscaled to print use. 

Print is very difficult to pursue. Unless you have a printed copy of the offending collateral, chances are you don't have a chance in court regardless of where you sold your license. 

How can I protect My Images from such Infringements?

Technically, you can't. If you find one on the web, you could issue a DMCA on a web host where the site resides. It won't work if the offending server or web host in located in a country that have very different copyright laws than the one found in the US of A. 

When an image leaks onto the Internet, chances are it's a done deal. Your only hope is to petition Google with a DMCA to take down photos which appear on their search engine so that the you have some control over the spread of the wildfire. 

Google images can be your best buddy if you want to find stolen pictures but you have to be Internet savvy to know how to issue a take down. 

For example, a Fortune 500 company residing in Europe might use your stolen image in a slider, you can have that offending site taken off the Google search results. This will impact the offending party's capability to have a page rank and this is probably your best bet. 

Those mom and pop stores? Well you could do the same if you have the time but you have to show that you own those pictures (having a stock image agency link to the stolen photos can help). To know more about how DMCA works on the Internet, you can go to Chilling Effects to get a better picture.