Getty goes free online

Why Getty Going Free Is Such a Big Deal

The company has made tens of millions of its photos free for noncommercial use.

To quote from The Atlantic:

This may be the biggest innovation that is embedded, as it were, in the Getty move: The company is being realistic about the way its content is being used online. It’s trying to find ways to work with users, rather than against them, to build its own brand and find new revenue streams. According to Bloomberg Law, Getty has filed only seven copyright infringement lawsuits in the past five years; it seems resigned to the fact that porous walls, rather than solid ones, might make the most sense given the affordances of the Internet.

As Craig Peters, a business development exec at Getty Images, told The Verge: “Look, 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… Our content was everywhere already.”

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