Getty Giving Up?

UPDATE: HERE is a link to another article that better explains what is happening with Getty Images and the impacts on photographers and the industry in general, as well as just how valuable your information is to them...

ORIGINAL POST: Long the gold standard in licensed images, Getty recently announced they were going to make nearly all the images in their library free for non-commercial use. Yes, you read that correctly, free, as in, you do not have to pay a licensing fee to use the image unless it is for commercial use. Although, like anything that is "free", there is also a bit of a catch. The images will still be housed on the Getty servers, but will allow consumers to use embeddable code to link the image in their blog, on Facebook, etc.

It sounds as if Getty has realized they cannot go around suing the millions of people that use Getty images for personal use, but they can use those same consumers to try and leverage advertising dollars. It looks like Getty will begin doing what the likes of YouTube have done, and will utilize this new embrace of embeddable code to sell targeted advertising in an effort to increase revenues. So, non-licensed use has traded a watermark for a privacy-invading line of code that will be used to try and sell products and services that their algorithm determines you are likely to be interested in.

As a photographer, I cannot help but wonder what all the people who rely on residuals from Getty might feel about all this? I recognize that many of the images found on Getty have been available for "free" through nefarious means in the past, but does this new stance actually encourage people to not pay for a photographer's work? By no longer requiring consumers to pay for the right to use the images, what then is the incentive to add images to Getty? To me, this seems like a slippery slope, and just might spell doom for stock photographers worldwide.

HERE is one of the many articles available online right now regarding the decision made by Getty. With the many questions and realms this affects, the fallout could be huge (or it could be virtually non-existent). At any rate, the landscape of photography is changing every day, and we photographers need to be sure to stay on top of the shifts and either fight to keep things the same, or champion change.

I am curious how you might feel about this policy change. Thanks for reading.