On June 5, 2008,
Alamy announced the first initiative in their Novel Use Scheme, calling it Limited Use. Alamy says it will allow images to compete on the low cost micropayment world.
Alamy adds
"The pricing for these usages is outlined below. Limited Use will only be visible to buyers in the UK to begin with. (This means that only contributors in the UK will be able to see the changes on the web site when Limited Use is launched.) The service will be rolled out worldwide once we are satisfied with the performance of the scheme."
The areas defined by Limited use are Blogs, Social Networking, and Educational Use such as student handouts, theses, and lectures. Alamy did add this note to the Education Use section
"Please note that the images can be used by people working in education as defined above, it will not cover educational publishing which will continue to be sold under our standard model."
Contributors at Alamy are in upheaval over this. I did not sign for the Novel Use Scheme at Alamy. Why would I sign to Usage Terms that were not explained fully at the time of introduction? For contributors who did sign and and are now disjointed about it, they cannot opt out until next April 2009.
So it seems that now micro meets macro in Alamyland. RM images are fair game in the Limited Use offering unless image restrictions apply, so now there is a flurry of contributors hurriedly changing restriction selectors for oddball countries.
For those Alamy members who jumped at the chance for additional revenue that could amount in practice to only small dollars, well, next time, be careful what you click on.
A comment on the Alamy blog reads
"No, please do not do this! No, no, no and no."
Sorry gents, the toothpaste out of the tube on this one.
The blog over at
ThePhotographyBiz.com will keep an active track on this issue. There is also a little Alamy tutorial there on how to set image restrictions, which would then exclude such marked images from the Novel Use Scheme.
At this writing, Photoshelter, with their "no microstock" image listing policy, has not taken any official stand on how cross listed images, which could in theory sell at Alamy for 60 pence, will be handled at PSC. A few photogs on the forum there already trying to use the "But I didn't know..." defense. Will be interesting to see what decision is reached by PSC. Even though Alamy says "it's not microstock", well, it is sure walking and quacking like the proverbial duck.
To Alamy's credit, they've finally added proper watermarks to their images.
