Not good enough

[Cryptoprocta]

I found an unreported in-use in the TLS, used in Septermber 2020, on 11th June, and immediately did all the work to fill in the unreported use form.

Alamy's answer: "We'll ask the customer's account handler to look into this and we'll get back to you."

Nothing by19th July, so follow-up email: "Any word on this yet? I wouldn't have thought it would be difficult to chase up given that they have an "account handler".
Alamy's answer: "We've just chased our colleague about this - apologies for the delay. We'll get back to you once we have an update."

Nothing by yesterday (23rd August) so I emailled "Another month has passed, and this image has STILL not been notified or paid for. You need to move much faster. What is your extra 20% doing for us?"

Alamy's answer:  We're sorry for the delay on this. As soon as we hear from the customer's account handler, we'll be in touch.

 

Given that it seems certain that this delay on their part will have changed my cut from 50% to 40% and it's unlikely that Alamy will put on a punitive charge, or even charge at the 'going rate' (but it would be nice to be wrong on this), I consider this unacceptable. As TLS has credited both Alamy and me, I don't think they're trying to pull a fast one; unlike with the Muddle, this may have been a genuine mistake, which Alamy should have been able to clear up with one email or phone call.

My file is still up there and of course I have saved out the HTML page and taken screenshots.

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/the-abstainer-ian-mcguire-review-george-berridge

(I do realise this will be a low-value sale, unless Alamy surprises me, as above.)

 

BTW, if there are too many unreported uses for the 'account handlers' to handle, why not use some of your extra 20% to hire more?

 

Edited August 24, 2021 by Cryptoprocta

[woofit]

That is terrible service from Alamy/PA....You just feel that they really do not have a grip on the situation....first they do not report the sale, then they do little to chase and follow up without a lot of prodding. I wish I could get 6 months + interest free credit from loan providers.....thats if they remember that I had a loan with them!!

[Colblimp]

I can beat that - an unreported usage from Feb 2020 - sent in the usual form, 'we'll chase it up, yada yada' and I've heard nothing.

 

What else do we expect from this company?  It takes but doesn't give back.  Absolutely appalling. 😡

 

 

Edited August 25, 2021 by Colblimp

[spacecadet]

"We're taking 20% of your income, cutting our prices, introducing perpetual licences and increasing your risk of litigation, and in exchange we'll pursue infringements if we feel like it."

Have I got that right?

Edited August 25, 2021 by spacecadet

[Avpics]

7 minutes ago, spacecadet said:

"We're taking 20% of your income, cutting our prices, introducing perpetual licences and increasing your risk of litigation, and in exchange we'll pursue infringements if we feel like it."

Have I got that right?

Yes, and never an apology or a thank you for doing all the work for them.

[meanderingemu]

6 minutes ago, spacecadet said:

"We're taking 20% of your income, cutting our prices, introducing perpetual licences and increasing your risk of litigation, and in exchange we'll pursue infringements if we feel like it."

Have I got that right?

 

 

i think "if we feel like it" is actually generous.  it more "if it's an easy one you could have easily done yourself, In which case we will likely only charge normal licence price, for all other we will decline getting involved  but still keep your 20%+". 

[meanderingemu]

funny how i got upset with the new contract, but never got to the point of being mad like some of the older contributors, just being defeated, up to this week.  the total abandonment of semblance of  partnership i have felt over the last couple of weeks finally got me on the mad side. i'll get over it, but in the end we all lose. 

[Alamy]

For clarity, there are two strands to our approach for image infringements - the proactive process and the reactive process. 

 

Image use infringements are a reality of our industry. Sometimes the infringement will be down to a mistake an existing customer has made and sometimes it will be a literal image theft and use, often stolen from an existing legitimate use.

 

In Q1 of this year, Alamy put together a dedicated team to proactively tackle this. We are working with multiple external infringement services to crawl the web and secure funds for images that have originated from Alamy but have not been paid for. After the infringement service take their cut, we split the remainder with you according to your commission model. For these usages, we are prioritising images that are marked as exclusive to Alamy. We have very positive expectations of this team and have invested in it already and will continue to build it out. The process cycle is beginning to bear fruit now and we believe this will be a great source of revenue for our contributors over the coming years as we grow the service. 

 

The reactive service is what we call Unauthorised Use Queries (UUQs) and this is what the UUQ form on your dashboard is used for. This currently goes to a different team within the business, usually within the sales team as quite often these will be existing Alamy customers and they need to be investigated slightly differently due to the process in which they have been identified. We currently have a backlog of these we are working through and this is where the delays currently are which is why we offer you the option to chase yourself rather than wait. Of course we're not happy about there being a waiting time like this, but it is the reality. In time, the process for these infringements will live with the newly formed proactive team and we expect the turnarounds to be much quicker. 

 

James A

Head of Content

[Colin Woods]

31 minutes ago, meanderingemu said:

the total abandonment of semblance of  partnership i have felt over the last couple of weeks

 

Nicely put Jean-François.

[meanderingemu]

1 hour ago, Alamy said:

For clarity, there are two strands to our approach for image infringements - the proactive process and the reactive process. 

 

Image use infringements are a reality of our industry. Sometimes the infringement will be down to a mistake an existing customer has made and sometimes it will be a literal image theft and use, often stolen from an existing legitimate use.

 

In Q1 of this year, Alamy put together a dedicated team to proactively tackle this. We are working with multiple external infringement services to crawl the web and secure funds for images that have originated from Alamy but have not been paid for. After the infringement service take their cut, we split the remainder with you according to your commission model. For these usages, we are prioritising images that are marked as exclusive to Alamy. We have very positive expectations of this team and have invested in it already and will continue to build it out. The process cycle is beginning to bear fruit now and we believe this will be a great source of revenue for our contributors over the coming years as we grow the service. 

 

 

James A

Head of Content

 

 

would you be able to share some data on this?

 

Case numbers

Proportion excess recuperated by contributor over just the basic licence fee had the culprit not stolen image.

 

 

 

  

The new contract clearly states this is the only first line option available to contributors, so to be told "go do it yourself" or even in rare cases reported gone through only seeing normal licence fee is just extra burden on the contributor, at a cost of 20% to us, in exchange for no gain. 

 

 

 

 

[Alamy]

35 minutes ago, meanderingemu said:

 

 

would you be able to share some data on this?

 

Case numbers

Proportion excess recuperated by contributor over just the basic licence fee had the culprit not stolen image.

 

 

 

  

The new contract clearly states this is the only first line option available to contributors, so to be told "go do it yourself" or even in rare cases reported gone through only seeing normal licence fee is just extra burden on the contributor, at a cost of 20% to us, in exchange for no gain. 

 

 

 

 

 

You're not told "go do it yourself". For the UUQ type infringements there is a queue, which means delays for you. You are therefore given the option for us not to pursue it, and then you pursue directly yourself. You can choose to do that or not.

 

For your previous question, we can't share that data publicly for obvious reasons (no business would) and this is a newly formed team. 

 

Broadly speaking though, we are currently processing several thousand cases, expect this to grow significantly and typically have a starting point fee of around 5x the regular licence (as per our EULA) but many factors go into that on a case by case basis ranging from number of images, type of use and how far down the legal process things get to. 

 

Hopefully we'll be able to indicate within contributor accounts that the sales come from the infringement process as this will make things clearer, but this is TBC for now.

 

James A

[spacecadet]

Fair enough.

But the jury is definitely out.

[meanderingemu]

23 minutes ago, Alamy said:

 

You're not told "go do it yourself". For the UUQ type infringements there is a queue, which means delays for you. You are therefore given the option for us not to pursue it, and then you pursue directly yourself. You can choose to do that or not.

 

For your previous question, we can't share that data publicly for obvious reasons (no business would) and this is a newly formed team. 

 

Broadly speaking though, we are currently processing several thousand cases, expect this to grow significantly and typically have a starting point fee of around 5x the regular licence (as per our EULA) but many factors go into that on a case by case basis ranging from number of images, type of use and how far down the legal process things get to. 

 

Hopefully we'll be able to indicate within contributor accounts that the sales come from the infringement process as this will make things clearer, but this is TBC for now.

 

James A

 

 

i guess we will have to see, but i guess being told as first response to go handle it yourself, or just wait because your case is not important enough,  less than one month after implementation of a contract that forces us to go to Alamy first (before we only had to do it for clients, which someone who stole isn't) and with a clear statement that pursuing infringement cases  was one of the significant reason for the commission reduction (23% on my most recent licence) does leave a bit of bad taste, especially with no visible gains to date. 

 

I do look forward to further communication on the matter, maybe another subject for a blog post on the working of the team. 

 

 

[Panthera tigris]

So to clarify?

 

a) Photographer notified cases - standard fee minus 60%?

 

b) Contractor identified cases - 5 x fee minus 50%, then minus 60% of remainder 

 

My average fee is about 30 USD I would say, so (I am extrapolating to work out a probable average outcome for myself).....

 

a) 30 USD minus 60%, so would be 12 USD to me?

b) 30 USD x 5 = 150. 150 minus 50% is 75 USD, so my 40% of that would be 30 USD to me?

 

 

Thank you for starting a conservation about this James, this is the first time Alamy have actually given us any real information about this new infringement system.

 

Please feel free to correct me especially about how the initial fee is calculated as I have used my own average which may not be correct. For example Pixy used their own fee structure to get the initial price before deducting their fee.

 

FYI my actual average fee this year is 29.285 USD per image of which I get 12 USD if Alamy sells direct and some very low number if a distributor sells the image ( I still am not sure how much one would get from a distributor sale, the latest blog post on the new contract made it a bit unclear to me).

 

Edited August 26, 2021 by Panthera tigris
Typo

[geogphotos]

My share of the most recent Pixsy infringement payment was c £285.

 

Some are lower - one as low as $50 my share - but that is unusual and there must have been special circumstances.

[Celluloid Hero]

Proactive, really? Procrastination more likely.

[Cryptoprocta]

Meanwhile, re the unreported TLS use above, I got an email:

"We have received confirmation that this use will be billed this week.
We're sorry for the lengthy delay on this query. "

 

Then last night I found another unreported use, this time from November 2020.

So I contacted Alamy. It was on a Russian website but credited to Diomedia.

Answer:  Thanks for sending this over.  We do have a relevant download from a distributor so we’ve passed this on to our distribution team to bill.

Shouldn't we (logically and morally, if not contractually) be getting the 60% on unreported sales or misuses that we find and report to them?

If there's a relevant download, why hasn't there been some 'proactivity' in getting it billed before now?

I bet if there was some sort of penalty on distributors (e.g. give whoever 'notices' it, us or Alamy, their share), they'd be better at reporting on time. As it stands, they'll get more than I do and the sale might never have been billed or paid. And, again, I'll get even less than I would have had it been paid on time, before our share got cut by 20%.

Edited August 26, 2021 by Cryptoprocta

[Cryptoprocta]

On 25/08/2021 at 12:24, Alamy said:

The reactive service is what we call Unauthorised Use Queries (UUQs) and this is what the UUQ form on your dashboard is used for. This currently goes to a different team within the business, usually within the sales team as quite often these will be existing Alamy customers and they need to be investigated slightly differently due to the process in which they have been identified. We currently have a backlog of these we are working through and this is where the delays currently are which is why we offer you the option to chase yourself rather than wait. Of course we're not happy about there being a waiting time like this, but it is the reality.

 

James A

Head of Content

Why should we lose 20% because  PAlamy didn't hire enough people to get through the backlog before the contract change?

[shearwater]

7 hours ago, Cryptoprocta said:

Meanwhile, re the unreported TLS use above, I got an email:

"We have received confirmation that this use will be billed this week.
We're sorry for the lengthy delay on this query. "

 

Then last night I found another unreported use, this time from November 2020.

So I contacted Alamy. It was on a Russian website but credited to Diomedia.

Answer:  Thanks for sending this over.  We do have a relevant download from a distributor so we’ve passed this on to our distribution team to bill.

Shouldn't we (logically and morally, if not contractually) be getting the 60% on unreported sales or misuses that we find and report to them?

If there's a relevant download, why hasn't there been some 'proactivity' in getting it billed before now?

I bet if there was some sort of penalty on distributors (e.g. give whoever 'notices' it, us or Alamy, their share), they'd be better at reporting on time. As it stands, they'll get more than I do and the sale might never have been billed or paid. And, again, I'll get even less than I would have had it been paid on time, before our share got cut by 20%.

I have got some exactly like that. Alamy knows they have got a "relevant download" from a distributor from many months ago, even years. But it seems that nobody take care to check if it has been used and bill it. Nor the client to declare the use, nor the distributor to report, nor even Alamy to bill. So, we are left alone at what we can find by ourselves...which I am sure is much less than what has actually been used without reporting. Would appreciate a penalty to the offender for not doing its job and a reward for us for doing it.

Edited August 26, 2021 by shearwater
Corrections

[Colblimp]

6 hours ago, Cryptoprocta said:

Why should we lose 20% because  PAlamy didn't hire enough people to get through the backlog before the contract change?

Because greed, plain and simple.

[Cryptoprocta]

Well, good news. The OP TLS file was reported today and priced at $53.18 gross, $21.27 net.

I'm guessing TLS would normally have a discount, so 🙂 (shame about the extra 20% though).

[Simon]

I've still an outstanding unauthorised use going back to June that is waiting a response from sales .. chased several times, still waiting.