The stock photo giant Getty images makes a radical move in the face of photo piracy.
Getty Images is the largest photo agency in existence with a gargantuan library of creative and editorial stock images.
In a radical move, the company announced that it has made the majority of its editorial content free to use when using a proprietary embed code that links back to the Getty site (see below).
The reason for this is that the volume of images licensed to Getty being used illegally has risen exponentially to an extent where it is too difficult to police.
Business Development Executive Craig Peters stated that “Our content was everywhere already; if you want to get a Getty image today, you can find it without a watermark very simply. The way you do that is you go to one of our customer sites, and you right-click. Or you go to Google Image search or Bing Image Search, and you get it there. And that’s what’s happening.”
By adopting this new system, Getty is hoping that more people will use the embed code that links back to the site, which may be used to serve advertisements in the future.
