New Approach to Photo Piracy

Copyright infringement is usually associated with movies, games or music, but photos can also be infringed, particularly with services like Instagram kicking in hard. Today there’s a new service out there, called Dreamstime, which forwards a solution to this problem.


The new service offers stock photos, all packed into different genres, like Abstract, Nature, People, and so on. The entire database is currently accounts for more than 15.000.000 images. The problem of copyrighted photos is still huge, particularly when popular social networks like Facebook or Tumblr allow their members to publish almost any photo they like. This doesn’t make professional photographers very happy when they see their works posted without permission or payment. Of course, the first reaction of the lawyers was to find users who infringed copyright and squeeze thousands of dollars out of them.

Actually, this strategy has already become a serious source of revenues. The only problem here is that those thousands of dollars are not actually reflecting the damage done by the pirates.

That’s why Dreamstime offers another solution: the service sends a notice to take the image down or buy a license for only $8. According to the company, the new approach does bring some profit. Dreamstime says that they want to respond to copyrighted images, but in a different, non-heavy-handed way. Their solution is considered very successful in turning illegal users into customers: once those learn of the license, they tend to obtain larger licenses.

However, Getty (similar service using image recognition software to identify the illegal use of their images) doesn’t approve of this method, pointing out that the DMCA takedown process can’t be regarded as an adequate remedy, as it doesn’t ensure that the content creators receive compensation. In reality, this compensation isn’t always the case, because most users don’t receive it whatsoever out of their sharing. This is why Getty might consider the idea offered by Dreamstime.