What's the Over-Under on How Long IStock Photo/Getty Stay in Business?

HatTip: PetaPixel vis SLR Lounge

Coming off last year's debacle when Getty was found to have violated violated copyright law, you might have expected the company to tread carefully when it comes to bad publicity.

Nope.

Thousands of photographers just received emails from the company informing them that their future payments were going to be limited.

Getty contends that the payment system erroneously overpaid these contributors in September/October 2013.  The individuals overpaid will have royalty payments confiscated until that overpayment is recovered.

I predict a great deal of umbrage on part of the affected contributors.  There is little transparency on the company's part when it comes to royalty payments.  Contributors have no way of determining whether the payments received are accurate.  They had no way of knowing they were receiving an overpayment.  They probably feel they should not be the party bearing the burden here, since Getty/iStock Photo was the only one in this relationship with the ability to avoid the error.

Getty faces having a large number of contributors defect from their stock site, and the contributors with the largest incentive to leave are the ones hit hardest by the overpayment problems.  These are most likely the most successful contributors.

Having the most successful contributors leave the stock site does not bode well for the company's future.

(Note to Getty: Having your most successful contributors flee your stock site is going to hurt your bottom line far more than simply writing off these overpayments.)

BTW, this wouldn't be the first mass defection from the company.  There was one last year following a deal Getty mad with Google.


It gets worse when you factor in the Morel episode.  Getty has already proven itself to be a bad actor.  Some contributors might suspect that this is nothing more than a way for the company to recoup the copyright infringement award in that case. 

Don't be surprised if Getty gets sued over this move as well.

The affected contributors have an argument that Getty assumed the risk of overpayment due to the way they structured the relationship between contributor and company.  Getty was the only one in the relationship in position to ensure correct payment amounts.  They may have lost any ability to recover overpayment as a result of that arrangement.

Then there is the suspicion that this is being done to cover the Morel award.  At the very least, a lawsuit would force Getty to open it's books in order to prove that it overpaid.  The people running Getty have already proven themselves to have little regard for the law as a result of the Morel case.  Why would the people that had no qualms violating one photographer's legal rights have any qualms violating the contractual rights of their contributors?

Getty may very well have inadvertently overpaid some of its contributors, but it should be up to the company to prove that before asking those contributors to repay.

A letter stating that future earnings will be confiscated  and the amount being confiscated just doesn't cut it.