Permalink25 February 2009 at 15:38 by Alan Capel - Head of Content
Posted under News
The images in the Alamy collection are split between those where the images have gone through the new Annotation screens (we call these ‘New Annotation’) and those keyworded before we brought in the additional questions in Sept 07 (‘Old Annotation’).
Specifically, not all images have answers to the following additional questions which were introduced:-
- How many people are in this picture?
- Does this picture contain property that needs a release for commercial use?
One of the benefits of the additional questions is that they should help us identify images that don’t need a release.
Old Annotation images simply have a model/property release value of YES or NO so it's not clear whether the image needs a release or not.
If the image has gone through 'New Annotation', the system that builds the Commercial Collection looks at the answers to the New Annotation questions before deciding whether that image should be included.
We have been very surprised though by the lack of accuracy of the new annotation and this is leading to ‘unsafe’ images entering the Commercial Collection because our system deems them to be ‘safe’ for Commercial Use.
We do not intend to show examples as that wouldn’t be fair on the contributors involved but please remember the following:-
- A ‘person’ is a person regardless of how identifiable they are
- A body part is defined as a ‘person’
- Members of the public caught in the background of a shot are still 'people'
- A Property Release is required for intellectual property such as logos or brand names
- With regards to Property, it is not sufficient that you own an item, you also need a release from the manufacturer. For example, if you own a mobile phone and take a shot of it and it has the ‘Orange’ and ‘Nokia’ logos on it, unless you have releases from these companies you do not have the sufficient property releases to sell the image ‘Commercially’
- As a consequence of the above Property Releases are very very rare
We have found a worrying number of images where the contributor has stated that a release exists where we do not believe that they have one from the company involved. More frequently though we have seen a lot of images where the question ‘does this picture contain a property that requires a release for commercial use’ has been answered ‘NO’ where there are houses, shops, boats, offices, phones, cars etc all within the shot.
Our site has comprehensive help on this with many examples.
We know there are images in the Commercial Collection that do not adhere to the above and we are working on refining the collection but that won’t happen overnight and we do need your help.
We would urge all contributors to look again at their answers to the ‘New Annotation’ questions to ensure they are correct. We would also like to encourage contributors who haven’t put their images through ‘New Annotation’ to do so. The images are marked in ‘Manage Images’ as ‘On sale - More details required’
But where are the bulk tools to do this? I hear you cry. As we announced on the blog last week, the tools are with a small group of test users and aside from the inevitable handful of bugs, they have been very well received and we are now finalising a version to make available to a large initial roll out group, followed by all contributors. We have found that a staggered roll out works very well in these situations but we will try to target the roll out to those active contributors who will benefit the most. Keep an eye out for a notification shortly.
Other stock sites may have different rules and guidelines when it comes to releases and this can further confuse a situation that is not crystal clear. In the last 20 years we have seen the legal landscape change many times and we have to adapt and react to these changes. We’ve spoken with our contacts at other agencies and taken experienced legal advice and have developed our guidelines accordingly.
We appreciate that occasionally there may be 'grey areas' from a legal perspective when it comes to property, our advice would be to protect yourselves and if in doubt, state that the image DOES contain property that requires a release and that you don’t have a release. Your images will of course remain on ‘All of Alamy’
I’d like to stress again that we are moving forward one step at a time. In the future we want to reach a position where releases are uploaded with images and all images have gone through 'New Annotation'. We also need our contributors to gain a wider understanding of when a release is and isn’t required and as a result vastly improve the quality of the annotation.
We are continuing to work on the Commercial Collection and will update you all through the blog in due course
Please remember that ‘All of Alamy’ remains the default search option for all visitors to the site.
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