Interview with Alamy CEO James West

When you get a moment this is an interesting interview with James West, the CEO of Alamy. He is one of the younger leaders in this space and he definitely is innovative and not a part of the core group of old school folks. Take a look when you get a chance.

About the Image reported that, "The UK-based image portal, Alamy, recently took the unprecedented step for a privately held company of releasing its revenue figures to the public. The figures show a company on an impressive trajectory having grown total sales from US$129K in 2001 to US$24.2MM in 2006. Founded by its CEO James West and his uncle, Mike Fischer, in 1999, Alamy also manages to dedicate significant sums to medical research and invests in technology to reduce the company’s carbon footprint."

The article is interesting for Photographers and anyone following the business trends. They go over the effects of microstock, the falling dollar, editorial vs commercial client base and Alamy's Novel pricing approach which was still hush hush.

Photographers on Imagestate

We are very sorry to hear this for those affected but wanted to report on it in case people had news. StockAsylum posted some important information for professional stock photographers who had images with Imagestate or Heritage Image Partners, Ltd. An organization that represents professional stock photographers is appealing for information about a British stock photography distributor that will be dissolved on Jan. 12, probably without paying its photographers and, perhaps, without returning their images.

"If any reader has any information about the location of contributor property or current contacts for Imagestate, Heritage Image Partners, Ltd., or (bankruptcy administrator) Kroll, please contact SAA," Stock Artists Alliance said in a prepared release.

What a nightmare on the day after Halloween. Scary stuff indeed for anyone that makes a living off their images. About the Image wrote, "In addition to losing out on payments many contributors are now worried original images will not be returned, Sumner reports. "We have gone through a long list of contacts trying to get work returned as Imagestate seems to have a revolving door employment situation," he says. "It's been impossible to get answers or action on any of these issues, and there's been no communication from them at all to explain to photographers what's going on." This highlights one of the biggest fear contributors have to photo agencies. That the agency closes up shop, doesn't pay you, and you can't erase your images from the database so they are out of your control in the content abyss.

The organization also encouraged stock distributors doing business with Imagestate to communicate with contacts at the company. Let us know if you need anymore information about this or your stories.

I'm still not sure how they raised 2mm dollars and announced it the day before all this took place. Strange.

We promise you this. Cutcaster will never act like this if things turned south. We would never hold the images, allow people to delete them immediately and there would be a steady stream of information either on the blog, our forums, over email or calls with concerned parties. That was the pledge we made when we started Cutcaster. To always be here and available.

Does Creative Commons Protect you as a buyer of Content?

Apparently not. About the image reported today that Virgin Mobile Australia got burned when their Ad Agency, Host, used a not-model-released image in its nationwide print campaign. Host failed to realize that the license covers the photographer’s copyright, but not necessarily the people in the pictures. A very important detail that shouldn't be overlooked.

It's believed Host used the image becuase they thought they were protected under a Creative Commons license. Not so fast said the people depicted in the images.


Click here for more details from Agency Spy.