SAA Concerns . . .
Stock Asylum Staff Report
April 19, 2007
Getty Images' decision to move the Image Bank rights-managed photography
collection into the company's new rights-ready library has at least
one photographers' organization scrambling to figure out exactly what
the change will mean.
An officer of Stock Artists Alliance (SAA) confirmed on this date that the organization is trying to get answers from Getty about a number of concerns. SAA President Roy Hsu also said that the group's leadership is seeking feedback from its own members, many of whom will be affected by the change announced Tuesday.
Hsu said he could not comment on specific concerns, but added that, "This is a thing that all photographers who are into rights-managed stock photography should take a look at."
By transferring a highly successful brand into the rights-ready library, Getty could stimulate additional interest in the new licensing model, perhaps encouraging other stock photo distributors to consider creating their own rights-ready libraries, Hsu said.
Moving most of the Image Bank collection into the rights-ready library is a significant commitment by Getty. When the company launched the rights-ready library last fall, it seeded it with rights-managed images that were not selling well.
The company upped the ante in January, transferring the 40,000-image Iconica collection to the rights-ready library. Switching Iconica from rights-managed was a significant, but not hugely important, move. One photographer who joined Iconica early on noted that Iconica had been established by amana, its previous owner, as an experimental approach to the market.
However, the 105,000 images in the Image Bank collection represent what is left of a global stock agency that once licensed photography from some of the best-known photographers in the world.
About 90,000 of the Image Bank images will be transferred to the rights-ready library in mid-May. The remainder, mainly those under existing exclusive licenses, will be transferred to the Stone and Taxi collections. Getty Images said it does not grant exclusive licenses to rights-ready image buyers.
Rights-ready, which offers broad usage rights and a ten-year license duration, is one of a number of ways the stock industry is trying to meet the needs of today's image buyers who often need to use the same visual materials in print, on the web and in other media.
Getty, Corbis and others have created flexible licensing packages for some rights-managed sales, but such packages tend to be priced too high for many clients.
The PLUS Coalition, a non-profit professional organization, is creating a number of "PLUS Packs" that are designed to meet the specific needs of some buyers. However, unlike rights-ready packages, prices for PLUS packs can be adjusted to reflect the extent of the usage. Rights-ready licenses cost the same regardless of the how often the images are used or how widely they are circulated.
Traditional rights-managed licenses are negotiated individually based on the intended uses. Such licenses usually have very specific usage parameters.
The Getty Images web site is at: http://www.gettyimages.com.
SAA is at: http://www.stockartistsalliance.org.
