Section 03
The Trade
Licensing, rights, content credentials, stock economics, and the paperwork that decides what a frame is worth.
Start here · Licensing
Photographers Found Out from a Press Release
How Getty and Shutterstock each handled the licensing of their libraries for AI model training — Shutterstock's contributor fund arrangement and Getty's lawsuit against Stability AI — told from the position of the photographers whose frames were in the files. The agreement was announced; the terms were the terms.
Licensing
three pieces-
A Subscription Download and a Licensed Download Are Not the Same Transaction
Where the money goes when a buyer pays one flat monthly rate for a bucket of images — how per-download royalty pools are calculated at Shutterstock and Getty, what the contributor rate history looks like, and the structural difference between subscription access and rights-managed or extended licensing.
Licensing -
Getty Sued. Shutterstock Signed. Then in January 2025 They Announced a Merger.
The sequence of events from Shutterstock's AI licensing deal through Getty's Stability AI lawsuit and generator launch to the January 2025 merger announcement — a timeline of the two largest stock agencies converging after taking opposite positions on the same question.
Licensing -
The Long Tail of Frames That Will Never Be Licensed Once
The economics of a stock library from the contributor side — keywording, review queues, portfolio depth, and the distribution of licensing income across a large collection where most frames earn nothing.
Licensing
Rights
two pieces-
What the Copyright Office Actually Said, and What People Think It Said
The Copyright Office's ruling on Zarya of the Dawn — the graphic novel registered for its text and arrangement, with the Midjourney-generated images refused — and the subsequent guidance holding that a machine's output is not authored.
Rights -
Instagram Re-Encodes Everything You Upload, and That Is an Editorial Decision
What Instagram's compression pipeline does to an uploaded image — resolution, EXIF retention, colour profile handling — and what the platform's published technical specifications say about it.
Rights
