Gary Crabbe / Enlightened Images

Thud. It’s a sound often heard when one body impacts something else. Today it’s the sound of the Stock Photo market impacting the bottom of the Marketplace. PDN Newswire is carrying the story of microstock agency Fotolia now offering a library of over a quarter million photos for Free. Yes, Free.

In a quote from the story, Fotolia’s North American President states, “There’s a lot of people out there where even $1 is too much for images.” Yep, that’s just the kind of market I want to target for the sales of my photogaphy. (read with: sarcasm) Are these people even called “customers” if they don’t ever have to buy from you?

And another question, if contracts depend legally on an exchange of value between parties, how are the images licensed? It seems like the only real option is that photos would need to be given away as a Creative Commons License. Selling them as RF under a license that contains any level of restriction is conditioned on the sale, for monetary value, of the image. Remember, it’s not the image they sell, it’s the permission to use the image.

I guess the photographers all had to agree to this action of allowing their images to be given away to clients for free. When they said, “Yes”, I heard, “Thud.”

Royalty Free has really just become… well, …I guess it’s just now plain old Free.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 21st, 2009 at 8:20 am and is filed under Newsworthy, Photo Business, Stock Photography. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.