Hacking Photography - one Picture at a time
Getty Images, one of the biggest stock image platforms, has banned AI-generated images. If you want to upload and sell work you created through DALL-E, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, or any other text-to-image tool, you won’t be able to do it there.
The reason? Potential copyright issues. Getty is concerned about the legality of such content, so they want to protect the site’s customers from unwanted copyright claims.
Unsplash has announced that it’s becoming a part of Getty Images. Although the company is being acquired, it doesn’t mean that it will disappear. It continues to operate under its own name, and despite the controversy, the images on Unsplash will remain free.
This is probably the dumbest thing I’ve ever read in my life, but Getty Images is apparently going to be the “dedicated in-game sports photographers” for the FIA Certified Gran Turismo Championships. Yes, that’s right, video game screenshots are now “photography”, according to Getty and Polyphony Digital, the developers of Gran Turismo for the Sony Playstation.
And it turns out this isn’t the first year that this has happened, either. Getty says that “the new service was debuted during the 2019 season” and “used its expertise in photographing live racing” to… create better screenshots, I guess.
Getty Images has announced that after poring over sales data and customer research, they’re ditching the rights-managed licensing options and going over to royalty-free for their “creative” images. Announced over email, the news makes sense from a business standpoint. This will make it a better deal for customers and make Getty more money. But, it’s not necessarily such a great deal for photographers.
Dallas-based digital marketing company CixxFive Concepts has recently filed a class action lawsuit against Getty Images. The lawsuit claims that Getty is allegedly licensing images that are in the public domain. But in addition to that, CixxFive Concepts also accuses Getty of using all kinds of “deceptive techniques” to make customers think that the company is the legal copyright holder.
Getty Images has announced an exclusive distribution partnership with 500px. Starting from late June 2018, 500px Marketplace will quit direct sales and e-commerce. Instead, Getty Images customers will be able to access royalty-free content from 500px, along with over 300 million images already available on Getty.
You’ve probably noticed by now that Google has removed the “View Image” button from its Image Search. The decision helped Google to settle its dispute with Getty, but it has made many users unhappy. The community, then, is finding ways to reclaim the View Image button, somehow or another.
A few days ago, Getty and Google announced the upcoming changes as a result of a licensing deal. The announced changes have arrived, and now you can’t see the “View Image” button on Google any longer. Instead, if you want to see the photo, you’ll have to go directly to the website where it’s hosted.
Photoshopping female bodies has been a question of many debates. Getty Images, one of the largest stock photo agencies in the world, has just changed their rules concerning this issue.
According to their new rules, along with the submission of the images, you’ll also need to declare whether the model’s body size and shape have been digitally manipulated or not. If they have, you shouldn’t submit the images.
Although some quite enjoyed the idea of seeing Getty get a good legal spanking for once, that is not how things are turning out. US District Court Judge Jed S. Rakoff has dismissed all of Carol Highsmith’s federal copyright claims. After the dismissal on October 28th, he left three of Highsmith’s state law claims intact. Those, too, have now been voluntarily dismissed after Highsmith and Getty have reached an agreement to settle the case.
For those who missed it, Highsmith filed suit in July after she discovered that Getty had been charging fees to license images she had created without her consent. She only realised this after they attempted to bill her for the use of one of her own photographs and did a little digging. They had attempted to sell almost 19,000 images she had created.
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