Below is my top ten stock photography sites with reviews of the pros and cons. They are my top choices for the best searchable online databases for stock photography.
Who needs this:
Creative Professionals - advertising, marketing, website designers and graphic design
The Media - print and online publishing, magazines, newspapers, books, television and films
Corporate - in-house design, marketing and communication departments
1. Getty Images
2. Corbis Images
3. Jupiter
4. BigStock
5. Shutterstock
6. Punch Stock
7. Photos
8. Stock.xchng
9. Super Stock
10. Dreamstime
1. Getty Images
The second largest stock photo agency with 80 million still images
Pros: Widest selection of high quality images, interface, competitive pricing
Cons: All images are watermarked
2. Corbis Images
The largest stock photo agency with 100+ million still images
Pros: Huge quality selection, interface, no watermarks
Cons: Expensive
3. Jupiter
Pros: Best for quality, selection, interface, organization feature, no watermarks, best backgrounds,
Cons: No editorial
4. BigStock
Pro: Interface, selection, quality, very low cost ($1+), Images over white section
Cons: All images are watermarked, a lot of bad vector art to sift through
5. Shutterstock
Pros: Good interface, quality and good bulk prices, highest Alexa rank
Cons: Moderate quantity and quality (not really a con), slow site.
6. Punch Stock
Pros: Biggest selection of all of them, cheap,
Cons: No editorial, all images are watermarked, slowest site amongst this top 10 list.
7. Photos
Division of Jupiter Images - 2.6 million images
Pros: Best Current Editorial, interface, affordable to expensive, flexible pricing, some quality
Cons: Lowest prices, a lot of cheesy vector art to sift through, slow site
8. Stock.xchng
Owned by Getty Images. Only 500,000 images but is one of the most visited image sites.
Pros: Some free to low priced, high quality, fastest site amongst this top ten list
Cons: Interface could be better
9. Super Stock
4.3 million images
Pros: Wonderful quality, huge selection, interface is easy,
Cons: Needs more search features and site can be slow
9. Photos8
13 million images
Public domain photos and desktop wallpapers.
Pros: Unique highly artistic quality, interface, free
Cons: Categories could be better, bad interface, slow
10. Dreamstime
4 million images
Users upload their own files and receive a percentage from each sale. Unbelievable prices and stunning quality.
Pro: Free to very cheap, quality images
Cons: Interface doesn’t always work
Saturday, February 5, 2011
Monday, December 13, 2010
What Can’t Be Copyrighted
By Jeanne Mayeux
Copyright protection does not extend to any idea, procedure, process, slogan, principle, fact or discovery. Later works that merely happen to be very similar (or even identical) to earlier works do not infringe if they were, in fact, independently created.
You can’t sell or distribute, for example, libelous email messages. Also, of course, works that are obscene or invade another's rights of privacy or publicity are not publishable just because they happen to be covered by copyright.
Copyright protection does not extend to any idea, procedure, process, slogan, principle, fact or discovery. Later works that merely happen to be very similar (or even identical) to earlier works do not infringe if they were, in fact, independently created.
You can’t sell or distribute, for example, libelous email messages. Also, of course, works that are obscene or invade another's rights of privacy or publicity are not publishable just because they happen to be covered by copyright.
Copyright Myths from "A Crash Course in Copyright"
Copyright Myths
I can use it because it has never been published.
I can use it because I found it on the Internet and there was no copyright notice.
I can use it because I’m not making any money off of it.
I can use it because I am only using a small portion of it.
I can use it because I changed a lot of it and made it my own.
All of these thing can make you liable for copyright infringement. Now, whether you get away with it and don’t get sued or kicked off your IP is another matter.
I can use it because it has never been published.
I can use it because I found it on the Internet and there was no copyright notice.
I can use it because I’m not making any money off of it.
I can use it because I am only using a small portion of it.
I can use it because I changed a lot of it and made it my own.
All of these thing can make you liable for copyright infringement. Now, whether you get away with it and don’t get sued or kicked off your IP is another matter.
Thursday, December 2, 2010
Copyright Law Catching Up to the Internet
Here is another section of my book. It is in rough draft form:
The Internet has made copying and distributing protected material easier than ever before. You could be held liable for copyright infringement for storing your music collection on your hard drive, downloading photos from the Internet or forwarding news articles to your friends. It is conceivable that either inadvertent or deliberate copyright violations could be in the trillions. It sounds absurd, but copyright owners have the right to control reproductions of their works and claim statutory damages even when a use does not harm the market for their works. U.S. law authorizes judges and juries to award such damages in any amount between $750 and $30,000 per infringed work - and up to $150,000 per work if the infringement is deemed willful - without proof of any actual harm. The statute says the award should be "just" but provides no guidance about what this means. In one extreme case, a jury ordered an individual file sharer to pay nearly $2 million in damages for illegally downloading 24 songs. Is that really "just"?http://articles.sfgate.com/2010-09-26/opinion/24098184_1_copyright-law-copyright-experts-copyright-industry
In the UK a total of 7.2 Million people engage in violating UK's copyright laws
Questions arise as to the application of copyright law. How does it, for example, apply to the complex issue of fan fiction? If the media agency responsible for the authorised production allows material from fans, what is the limit before legal contraints from actors, music, and other considerations, come into play? As well, how does copyright apply to fan-generated stories for books? What powers do the original authors, as well as the publishers, have in regulating or even stopping the fan fiction?
Stewart Brand (then editor of Whole Earth Review) uttered the fateful words at the first hacker's conference in 1984: “On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.” If you conduct a search for the phrase information wants to be free you get close to 78 million results. That’s a lot of interest.
“I believe that all generally useful information should be free. By 'free' I am not referring to price, but rather to the freedom to copy the information and to adapt it to one's own uses... When information is generally useful, redistributing it makes humanity wealthier no matter who is distributing and no matter who is receiving.” Richard Stallman
"We live in this wierd time, an age of prohibitions, where in many areas of life ordinary people live constantly against the law. ordinary people live life against the law. The kids live life knowing they live it against the law – which is extremely corrosive and extraordinary corrupting. In a democracy we ought to do better"Lawrence Lessig TED 2007
The problem is it takes time and money to create something. When you finally publish it and someone takes it, because of uncontrolled distribution on the Internet, you lose income and your time is wasted. There has to be a better solution for permission to reuse copyrighted works; a better way to pay the copyright holders. Can you imagine the profit potential if these billions of people started paying just pennies for using this content for their limited purposes. This is win-win. If the laws don’t change soon people will just choose to ignore them creating anarchy.
The Internet has made copying and distributing protected material easier than ever before. You could be held liable for copyright infringement for storing your music collection on your hard drive, downloading photos from the Internet or forwarding news articles to your friends. It is conceivable that either inadvertent or deliberate copyright violations could be in the trillions. It sounds absurd, but copyright owners have the right to control reproductions of their works and claim statutory damages even when a use does not harm the market for their works. U.S. law authorizes judges and juries to award such damages in any amount between $750 and $30,000 per infringed work - and up to $150,000 per work if the infringement is deemed willful - without proof of any actual harm. The statute says the award should be "just" but provides no guidance about what this means. In one extreme case, a jury ordered an individual file sharer to pay nearly $2 million in damages for illegally downloading 24 songs. Is that really "just"?http://articles.sfgate.com/2010-09-26/opinion/24098184_1_copyright-law-copyright-experts-copyright-industry
In the UK a total of 7.2 Million people engage in violating UK's copyright laws
Questions arise as to the application of copyright law. How does it, for example, apply to the complex issue of fan fiction? If the media agency responsible for the authorised production allows material from fans, what is the limit before legal contraints from actors, music, and other considerations, come into play? As well, how does copyright apply to fan-generated stories for books? What powers do the original authors, as well as the publishers, have in regulating or even stopping the fan fiction?
Stewart Brand (then editor of Whole Earth Review) uttered the fateful words at the first hacker's conference in 1984: “On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.” If you conduct a search for the phrase information wants to be free you get close to 78 million results. That’s a lot of interest.
“I believe that all generally useful information should be free. By 'free' I am not referring to price, but rather to the freedom to copy the information and to adapt it to one's own uses... When information is generally useful, redistributing it makes humanity wealthier no matter who is distributing and no matter who is receiving.” Richard Stallman
"We live in this wierd time, an age of prohibitions, where in many areas of life ordinary people live constantly against the law. ordinary people live life against the law. The kids live life knowing they live it against the law – which is extremely corrosive and extraordinary corrupting. In a democracy we ought to do better"Lawrence Lessig TED 2007
The problem is it takes time and money to create something. When you finally publish it and someone takes it, because of uncontrolled distribution on the Internet, you lose income and your time is wasted. There has to be a better solution for permission to reuse copyrighted works; a better way to pay the copyright holders. Can you imagine the profit potential if these billions of people started paying just pennies for using this content for their limited purposes. This is win-win. If the laws don’t change soon people will just choose to ignore them creating anarchy.
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
Crash Course in Internet Copyright Law Powerful Strategies for Finding Dirt Cheap Digital Content and Getting Permission for Use
This is my first blog post for a book I am writing. This book has a tentative publish date of January 2011. This is a rough draft for the introduction of the book.
Following Intellectual property and copyright laws in a global economy can be like negotiating a minefield. As the Internet morphs into something new every day, copyright issues attached to much of the content on the Internet also increase. It is as if the two are twisting in the winds of change becoming a tangled mess.
Determining what works are protected and why can be nearly impossible without the services of patent, copyright and trademark lawyers; and these guys don’t come cheap. Hopefully this book will save you money on legal fees.
It is estimated that millions of people unintentionally break copyright laws everyday simply by passing along information in emails, blogs, forums and websites. I know this sounds absurd. But this is the law as it stands today. Copyright law needs to catch up to the Internet.
You could do your own search about each legal issue as they arise but without a overall understanding of the laws, your search is likely to be flawed. Much of the information found on the Internet about copyright law ranges from misleading to dead wrong. I am not saying the laws are hard to understand. Any lay person can get this. You just want to make sure your source is right. Hopefully this book will give you peace of mind that you have not opened yourself up for a lawsuit or that your work will not be stolen.
This book is written in easy to understand plain English. Information about copyright law can get very complicated. Legalese can sometimes be incomprehensible. You can drown in the details.
The main focus of this book is on U.S. copyright law. There is also section on international copyright law. You will find information on all intellectual property laws such as patents and trademarks but only as they pertain to copyright.
Following Intellectual property and copyright laws in a global economy can be like negotiating a minefield. As the Internet morphs into something new every day, copyright issues attached to much of the content on the Internet also increase. It is as if the two are twisting in the winds of change becoming a tangled mess.
Determining what works are protected and why can be nearly impossible without the services of patent, copyright and trademark lawyers; and these guys don’t come cheap. Hopefully this book will save you money on legal fees.
It is estimated that millions of people unintentionally break copyright laws everyday simply by passing along information in emails, blogs, forums and websites. I know this sounds absurd. But this is the law as it stands today. Copyright law needs to catch up to the Internet.
You could do your own search about each legal issue as they arise but without a overall understanding of the laws, your search is likely to be flawed. Much of the information found on the Internet about copyright law ranges from misleading to dead wrong. I am not saying the laws are hard to understand. Any lay person can get this. You just want to make sure your source is right. Hopefully this book will give you peace of mind that you have not opened yourself up for a lawsuit or that your work will not be stolen.
This book is written in easy to understand plain English. Information about copyright law can get very complicated. Legalese can sometimes be incomprehensible. You can drown in the details.
The main focus of this book is on U.S. copyright law. There is also section on international copyright law. You will find information on all intellectual property laws such as patents and trademarks but only as they pertain to copyright.
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