Commons:How Alamy is stealing your images

Shortcut: COM:ALAMY

This page may contain some profanity. If you are PC Principal you probably shouldn't edit this page. Or read it. Try going here instead. Everyone else should probably take this essay with a grain of salt. Or a truckload.

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Alamy (official site) is a (stock) photo aggregation site owned by PA Media Group. (formerly the Press Association), and is an affiliate of Getty Images. And as we speak they are stealing your images. By the time you are done reading this essay, they will have stolen hundreds more! Meanwhile, many more stock photo sites (including but not limited to Alamy) are stealing the old (like PD-old-70-1923) public domain! In this context, "stealing" means they try to make it look like they own the copyright for an image. In some cases this will lead to the rightful owner no longer being able to benefit from their rights. It's actually more accurate than "You Wouldn't Steal a Car".

I wouldn't fuck with this guy.

Alamy would.

This is how it works:

1. Photographer (Pixabay user rcelis) uploads a photo with CC0 public domain waiver: https://pixabay.com/en/manny-pacquiao-boxer-boxing-athlete-1212545/. Or a Commons user takes a photo themselves, in that case the image can truly be stolen.
2. Commons user uploads photo with public domain tag: File:Manny Pacquiao weigh-in.jpg.
3. Alamy copies the photo from Commons, often with the same filename and description and sells it without any kind of attribution: http://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-manny-pacquiao-weigh-in-166049358.html.
4. Another Commons user nominates the image for deletion: "Appears to be a copyrighted image: http://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-manny-pacquiao-weigh-in-166049358.html".
5. Administrator deletes the image from Commons because Alamy likes plagiarism.

Now Alamy has your image and watermarked it, but it is banned on Commons! Nobody will believe you now if you say you are the author. Paul Fearn (2,233,976 uploads on Alamy) or one of the few other Alamy accounts that pulls this shit owns your ass now!

This clusterfuck has been going on for a while, at least since June 2015.

You think you pay for a license..

Alamy charges only 9.99 Euros for personal use and up to 179.99 Euros for a large business! Selling the service to download the image is one thing, but how can Alamy charge large sums of money for selling rights they don't have? It makes no difference if you buy the image for 9.99 or 179.99, the photo is still CC0. And in both cases you got screwed.

They also mess with the resolution of images. https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-lynda-carter-wonder-woman-167024931.html is the WikiPedant revision of File:Lynda Carter Wonder Woman.JPG. The original (here) is 848 × 1263. Alamy claims to offer this image with 1295 × 1929 pixels. That's 1427031 (133%) extra pixels Alamy is pulling out of their ass!

Did you get some shitty "give us money!" mail from "License Compliance Services"?

If you own a website, it's possible you receive some threatening junk mail from "License Compliance Services, Inc. on behalf of Alamy".

Surprise!! License Compliance Services, Inc. is Alamy! And these are some real bastards.

Fun fact: when you enter "license compliance services" in the searchbox on DuckDuckGo the first suggestion is "license compliance services scam". As of when this essay was originally written, when you entered "license compliance services sc" into the the searchbox on Google, the only suggestion was "license compliance services science photo library". Somebody had been fucking with these results and I think I know who! [Ed. January 2021: the Google results now appear to be more balanced; YMMV, but among the early hits are EFF Responds After License Compliance Services Attacks Fair Use by Daniel Nazer, December 23, 2015, on the site of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and License Compliance Services, Also Known as PicScout Inc. – a Suspected Extortionist, a blog post by Thomas Eklund October 14, 2015, updated January 12, 2017.]

Carol M. Highsmith sued Alamy in July 2016 for selling photographs without attribution she had donated to the Library of Congress. License Compliance Services, part of Alamy, had also sent an e-mail to the "This is America!" foundation, a foundation that was founded by Highsmith herself. The e-mail stated "We have seen that an image or image(s) represented by Alamy has been used for online use by your company. According to Alamy’s records your company doesn’t have a valid license for use of the image(s)." and demanded to pay a settlement fee of $120 for the infringement Highsmith was accused of. The photograph in question was not an infringement but an original work of authorship of Highsmith. Highsmith's claim was dismissed because she had signed away her copyrights, putting the photographs in the public domain.

So if you get such a "Unauthorized Use of Alamy Image(s)" asswipe in your mailbox, maybe you violated their copyright. Or maybe you didn't. Or maybe Alamy violated your copyright. It's anyone's guess! If you have received such a mail for an image that can also be found on Commons, please visit the talkpage for this page and share the details with us. Alternatively you can share the information with us at Commons:Village pump/Copyright.

What can you do?

Not that much really. You could move to a more restrictive license, but Alamy or other aggregation sites may or may not respect that. You could watermark your images, that way you will at least be able to prove to Commons Alamy stole it and request undeletion.

Solution?

Detect it when somebody tries to speedy delete or nominate a file for deletion with an Alamy link and automatically insert a comment with information about Alamy and convert speedy to DR. That way nobody can do a speedy deletion linking to Alamy anymore. We can't stop Alamy from copying images from Commons and so far they are operating within the law. (well most of the time anyway) We just need to stop images from being deleted just because they are on Alamy. We also need to set up a project to go over past deletion requests that linked to Alamy as a source. Many of those are likely speedy deletions which means there often is no public trace this happened if the deleting administrator didn't put that Alamy link in the edit summary. This is a problem.

But what Alamy does is, although dickish, completely legal.. OR IS IT??

http://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-manny-pacquiao-weigh-in-166049358.html says "Contributor: Paul Fearn / Alamy Stock Photo". So that's a little vague, giving them some wiggle room to get out of fraud claims.

Very clever guys. Not clever enough though.

https://www.alamy.de/stockfoto-manny-pacquiao-wiegen-in-166049358.html (archived) "Fotograf: Paul Fearn / Alamy Stock Foto" (Fotograf = photographer)

Bullshit!

Update 8 June 2018: the "Fotograf" section above was added 4 April. On 5 June, it still said "Fotograf". But now, Fotograf has been changed to Bildanbieter ("image provider"). This appears to have happened shortly after a jump in pageviews for this page. Is Alamy actually reading this? If you are, you are welcome to register here. (Beware of the username policy though, register with the name of a person like "Helen Hicks" or "Helen at Alamy". If you do, please also send a note OTRS so your identity can be verified. We are always open to conversation.

The dangers of allowing contributors to mass import public domain images

https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-cesa-1882-italian-luxury-design-since-1882-162782853.html is also fun. This was copied from Commons:Deletion requests/File:Antique Sterling Silver Design made in Italy since 1882.jpg. This image was registered as a trademark in 1989 in Italy. In this case this means the image is also covered by copyright. Commons has deleted it. Sure as shit that won't stop Alamy from selling it.

Compare the following:

• https://www.flickr.com/photos/mariya_umama_wethemba_monastery/2212819041/ (Creative Commons Attribution 2.0)
• File:Alice in Wonderland1-Jose de Creeft.jpg
• https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-alice-in-wonderland1-jose-de-creeft-166890602.html (Contributor/Fotograf: Paul Fearn / Alamy Stock Photo)

Oops!

How Alamy fucked the United States Fish and Wildlife Service in the ass

Hi Karen. I have some terrible news for you.

Um.. there's something on your face.

The United States Fish and Wildlife Service? Yes, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service. They released a photo of Kendra Chan and Karen Sinclair on Flickr with a Public Domain Mark.

And now Alamy is selling it.

Get it for free from Flickr! Get it for free from Commons! If you buy that from Alamy, what the hell are you paying for?

What makes matters far worse is that they chopped off the attribution from the description. (and I would call anyone claiming that to be an honest mistake a gullible moron) The original description says "Photo by Robyn Gerstenslager/USFWS" and Alamy probably just figured they could make more money by screwing over the photographer. Alamy credits this image to "Natural History Collection". Eat shit Alamy!

What about other stock photo sites?

Alamy is not the only site to do this, but is the most notable. What many stock photo sites will do is selling public domain photos and images of old paintings and drawings. For example Pencil illustration of Alexander Pope (1688-1744), English poet, created January 01, 1797. This image has the same "Rights-managed" status as fully copyrighted images. What rights Getty is managing? Perhaps who drives the Lambo and who drives the Ferrari. Or the rights to calculate the handicap they should play with? Who knows?

When you are on copyright patrol, watch out for stock photo sites and Alamy in particular. When a work looks like it may be old, check other sources to verify it is in the public domain. Just because a stock photo site is selling it doesn't mean it's copyrighted. If only Alamy is linked and you can't find reasonable proof that Alamy got it from a copyrighted collection, you shouldn't just assume it's copyrighted. For a copyvio, you preferably find another source.

• Agence France-Presse and Getty Images [1]
• Warner/Chappell [2]

Granger.com

Dicks.

Granger stole a CoA from Commons

• Original: File:Arms of Ordo cisterciensis.svg
• Old revision
• Granger.com selling this old revision of a file that originated from Commons (archived)

They are in a way worse than Alamy. They say "Full credit: Pictures from History / Granger, NYC -- All rights reserved." and "Full Credit: CPA Media - Pictures from History / GRANGER — All rights reserved." on that page.

Granger use SmartFrame technology in an attempt to prevent image downloads.

Bastards.

One more point about the practices of Alamy: I ordered a "high-resolution" file of a painting (> 11 MB) but I could download only a "compressed" version of about 0.6 MB. There is some bullshit information that this will "expand" to the original size with photo software. Of course, expand it does, but the lost pixels do not come back, they can only be interpolated. Most likely the painting was copied from the public Wikimedia version.