Changing The Stock Game

Getty Images just announced that blog sites now have access to post their images via an embed at no cost at all. Like free 99.

I was shocked!

Will this stop thieves? Will this help sales/promotion? How much will content creators rejoice?

“For the past decade or so, the best defense Getty Images could find against the right-click button on your mouse—home of the “copy” and “save” functions—has been a team of scary lawyers. By copying one of its images and using it on your blog, you’re entering a random drawing where the prize is a terrifying letter offering a tutorial in copyright litigation.” Bloomberg Business Week

“What we’re trying to do is take a behavior that already exists and enable it legally, then try to get some benefits back to the photographer primarily through attribution and linkage.” Craig Peters, senior vice president of business development, product and content at Getty Images

Everybody knows that Gil Scott-Heron is one of my heroes and I have always loved the photo above, which has been posted using Getty’s new free embed option. The cool thing is, I have an image to share, it can be cross-promoted via social media with the Twitter & Facebook buttons, & most importantly, it is properly giving credit to the photographer.

By embedding, users accept Getty Images’ terms which strictly limit use of the images in the following ways:

– Non-commercial, digital use only.
– Content embedded in the embedded viewer cannot be used outside of that context.
– No defamatory, pornographic or otherwise unlawful use.

It will be interesting to see how this program will go and if it will decrease any photo snatching.