Interview with… me!

A few weeks ago, one of my iStock buddies, Thomas_EyeDesign, asked me to do an interview for his blog about my stock photography work.  In case you missed it, and are interested , you can find it here: http://eyedesign9.wordpress.com/2009/10/24/sean-locke-interview/

Selling Vector Alphabets

With school starting and last week’s iStockalypse, it has been busy, busy, busy around here.  I’ll try to get back into more regular tips and such in the next few days.  By the way, buyers, feel free to email me with questions or issues about iStockphoto.com .

I’d like to ask for your opinion on something else.  As a matter of rule, iStockphoto tends not to allow vector artists to submit content that contains text, for various reasons, which I’ve detailed my thoughts on in this thread: http://www.istockphoto.com/forum_messages.php?threadid=105271&page=1 .  I’ve suggested the revisit this policy with regards to illustrated alphabets and small amounts of text.

If you have the time, would you stop by and voice your opinion on whether or not you feel these things would be a useful addition to the iStock library?  Thanks!

Swine Flu Trend

I don’t normally post about my stats or the performance of my portfolio on iStockphoto.com, but I thought this was kind of interesting.

When the swine flu news started ramping up, I did a set of images and got them into my portfolio, as I mentioned back here.  One of them started selling immediately.

It sold 11 image licenses the first day it was searchable.  “Great!”, I thought.  I’ve got a rocket here.  Alas, it was not meant to be.  After a few days of hot sales, as the news died down, so did the interest.  And it wasn’t due to the similars from other people that popped up on iStockphoto.  Below, I put the download chart from April 29 through today over the chart for “swine flu” from Google Trends, showing searching interest.  It’s pretty clear that worldwide interest in swine flu has disappeared.  Luckily, I seem to have nailed the peak on April 30th.  Blue is Google Trends, and green is my iStockphoto downloads.

I just found it interesting how closely they match up.  Well, it was fun while it lasted.

Vimeo.com Rights Grab?

In a recent thread on iStockphoto.com, a video contributor described how he had been denied iStockphoto’s video exclusivity contract because he currently has content (one video) on Vimeo.com, a video hosting site, sort of like youtube.  People use Vimeo a lot for “how to’s” and “behind the scene demos” as well as experimental and final footage clips.

The rejection for exclusivity from iStockphoto read:

Exclusivity denied as member has files posted at http://www.vimeo.com/user###### which grants that company a royalty free license to your files. Please contact us when the files have been removed and we can then reset your application.

Interesting.  One would think this would be like flickr or facebook, where one uploads and agrees to grants rights for the display and usage on the site, but nothing past that.

From flickr (Yahoo):

the license to use, distribute, reproduce, modify, adapt, publicly perform and publicly display such Content on the Yahoo! Services solely for the purpose for which such Content was submitted or made available.

Well, it’s easy enough to check out Vimeo’s terms of service.

Hmmm…. Overview… Blah blah… Refunds….  Ahhh, submissions.  Let’s see.  Holy Heck!

By submitting your Submission to VIMEO, you hereby grant VIMEO and its affiliates, successors and assigns a worldwide, perpetual, non-exclusive, irrevocable, royalty-free, sub-licensable (through multiple tiers) and transferable license (with a right to create derivative works) to use, copy, transmit or otherwise distribute, perform, modify, incorporate into other works, publicly perform and display your Submission or any portion thereof, in or through any medium, whether now known or hereafter created. VIMEO shall be entitled to unrestricted use of any Submission for any purpose whatsoever, commercial or otherwise, without compensation to the submitter.

So, you are granting them a license to do whatever they want, including sell or otherwise license your content, worldwide, forever!  Ok, maybe not forever.  That bit about perpetuity was probably just a sloppy lawyer.  A lower bit says:

the licenses granted by you herein shall terminate within a commercially reasonable time after you remove or delete such Submission from the Site

So, as long as you have content on the site, they are free to do whatever they want with your work wherever and however, without compensating you.  Heck, they can license it themselves, or distribute it to others to license for whatever use.

I wonder what they have to say about their intellectual property rights grab.  You would have thought this kind of thing has been publicized enough that this would have been written out better.