Getty’s got a new scheme to turn flickr into a revenue stream. Now, flickr users can set their pictures up to have a “Request to License” link underneath all of their photos. When someone clicks that link, they will be directed by Getty through the licensing process. The licensing fees, all royalty free, seem to range from $5 to $425. Getty will keep about 70% of the licensing fee. The BBC has good coverage of the deal. And Amateur Photographer outlines why both amateur and professional photographers should be worried about the Getty-Flickr scheme.

‘Amateurs are not necessarily au fait with the value of their images and could be persuaded to license them to Getty for low rates, thereby undermining the rate that professionals work so hard to achieve.’ -John Toner quoted by Amateur Photographer

The previous Call For Artists partnership between Getty and Flickr, launched two years ago, drew a fair share of criticism. See on flickr member’s experience, entitled “I feel like I got screwed by Getty,” as an example. In the first two months, the photographer made about $200, but the royalties soon dwindled to just a few dollars for each sale.

(via Slashdot, of all places)

A Developing Story brings together and promotes multimedia from and about the developing world. From professionally produced campaign work, to user-generated Flickr photosets, podcasts and written testimony, the site is designed to help these stories reach new audiences as well as creating, over time, a categorised archive for those working in international development to use for reference and inspiration.” -A Developing Story

From the people who brought you duckrabbit comes a new project aimed at sharing and discussing photography and coverage of NGOs and the developing world. A Developing Story looks to be a promising source of advocacy photojournalism and concerned photography and otherwise humanitarian-focused work. While I can’t abide the relentless promotion of Creative Commons licensing for photography funded and produced by governments and NGOs, especially if such organizations are to become the predominant backers of documentary photography (perhaps a rights managed repository of such photography, allowing centralized and easy licensing of the work would create a more sustainable model for the continued support of the work than Creative Commons), I’m impressed by the ambition and scope of the website. I’ll be checking in regularly.

The Associated Press has lately taken to strictly enforcing its copyrights and licenses, as it should, especially as regards search engines and news aggregators (the AP insists it isn’t going after bloggers…). The implementation, on the other hand, has been laughable. The latest development, the so-called “Protect, Point, Pay” DRM licensing system, has been given a brutal and deserved parody treatment. This comes as other institutions, including the New York Times, struggle to maintain cash flow to continue (profitable) news operations. David Simon, former Baltimore Sun writer and creator of The Wire, a vocal player in recent news industry ruminations, concludes that a paywall is the best chance for major newspapers’ survival. Rupert Murdoch agrees. Newspaper executives lately have been holding secret meetings trying to figure out how to maintain operational budgets, though always with a careful eye turned toward anti-trust and price-fixing laws. Newspapers want an anti-trust law exemption, which US Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi supports but which the Obama administration opposes. Perhaps the news business should be one of those industries to which Bill Maher’s new rule apply: not everything in America must turn a profit.

In the meantime, the Associated Press has also rolled out their quotation licensing software, to hilarious results. One must pay the AP when quoting as little as 5 words from a story. Worse still, perhaps, James Grimmelmann of the Laboratorium, found the AP’s automated licensing software is braindead enough to accept money and grant a license to words not written or owned by the Associated Press. The AP revoked the license and issued a statement (“It is an automated form, thus explaining how one blogger got it to charge him for the words of a former president.”), to which Grimmelmann replies. Of course, Grimmelmann’s just trolling for attention and the AP did well to refund his money for an invalid license, but the organization’s tactics are drawing too much bad publicity.

The Associated Press’s motivations are well-founded. News costs money to produce, and there are numerous outlets using the AP’s reports without paying appropriate licensing fees. Worse, these aggregators receive money for ads placed alongside this content, thus making money off of the illegal/improper/infringing distribution of the AP’s copyrighted materials. But finding an elegant solution to this dilemma has proven quite difficult, and the Associated Press’s recent attempts have only exacerbated the problem.

(via Reddit, Metafilter, Slashdot, and elsewhere)