Getty Images Inc. Finally Gives Up Their Photos for Free!

Getty images Inc. has finally decided to give up their fight against the right-click button on your mouse. The right-click button of your mouse is where you find formidable options like: Save and Copy. Those two words are a total nightmare to any company trying to protect its copyrights. Nonetheless, Getty Images Inc. has decided to embrace the darkness and provide their stock photos royalty-free on their website. After all, it’s not like they can sue everybody who illegally downloads the pictures!

This week the photography company is embarking on a different strategy where anyone can now visit its website, grab some embed code, and display an image on blogs and social media pages without paying a licensing fee. The embedding tool is intended only for noncommercial uses. Even with the use of PicScout, an intellectual-property protection service, Getty’s efforts to police the use of its images to the four corners of the Internet proved futile.

This is a giant leap for Getty, which makes its money selling permission to use photos from its vast library of work from more than 150,000 individuals, stock photo agencies, and media organizations. It is also a step forward towards a more open-sourced internet.

According to Bloomberg:

If the Getty project is successful, it will eventually open a new revenue stream. The images displayed on other websites will remain on a server owned and operated by the company and will contain information about the photographer and how to license the images for commercial use. Eventually, Getty could include advertisements within the embedded images, much like YouTube videos embedded on personal blogs show ads that bring revenue to Google. But Peters says Getty hasn’t figured out how exactly that will work.