The Tribune Of Microstock Authors

The Tribune Of Microstock Authors announced today its awareness raising campaign:

We have noticed with regret that there are wide spread violations related to the use of copyrighted images, which is partially driven by the popularity of microstock agencies.

One of the major violations is the distribution of microstock images by third parties, ignoring all the terms and conditions of the license purchased, including the forbidden act of distributing or reselling the images.

Some sites share these microstock images in exchange of little payments; others give it for free in order to gain more popularity, ranking on the search engines and increase their traffic. The administrators of these sites claim all the responsibility on the community of users who upload these images, while they know that most of their portal contents are illegal material. Only in some cases part of the violated copyrighted contents are removed if the authors claim their properties, at the same time by sending a notice of copyright infringement.

This violation of sharing copyrighted files is practiced mainly by purchasing a subscription plan through a Microstock agency (which offers the largest format or the vector file of the illustration).
Unfortunately, the majority of the authors of these images can’t protest this kind of violation of their images, because they don’t know from which agency they were downloaded.

As a demonstration against this illegal practice, the authors have gathered in a group on facebook and launched a public page called TRIBUNE OF MICROSTOCK AUTHORS with a purpose of calling the attention of the Microstock agencies, so we can together with them, reach to solutions, eliminating or reducing this kind of practice to the minimum.

One of the possible suggestions to limit piracy on these images is to exclude the vector formats & the over medium file sizes by subscription plans. This will surely make it difficult on pirate sites to gain money from small sized images.

A list of some pirate sites that are practicing this kind of violations is published on the page.
Your comments amd suggestions are welcome on the Facebook page.

For agencies the Tribune Of Microstock Authors can provide separate documents for easier reading.