![]() “I think this is one of the first times that we’ve identified a meme, quickly found the photo that was licensed for our website, and kind of been able to use our internal editor design tool to promote the legal use of a meme, to let businesses use this meme but also feel like protected when they’re using it,” Hayden said. Still, Hayden’s quick thinking was a way for the service to assert its place in the stock photo and meme universe when one of its works was having a moment in the spotlight. For the average lone social-media user, the rules remain fuzzy: “We don’t have an official policy on when we do or don’t pursue somebody who has taken an image from the internet if it happens to be ours … it would get reported to our IP team, and then they would investigate each report on a case by case basis,” Hayden said. It’s a little unclear whether Hayden and Shutterstock expect individual social media users to pay to license the photo Shutterstock is aimed more at companies that pay for bulk subscriptions to the service and access to its stockpile of images. “A lot of different meme websites that exist, they never talk about the legal part-the licenses-but on Shutterstock it’s just kind of baked into how we work.” Shutterstock spokesman Danny Groner added, “Just because something’s going viral doesn’t mean that it now belongs to everybody.” “Getting people to download the image is because what we want is for our photographers, contributors to get paid,” Hayden said. When you click the tool’s “share” or “download” buttons, it prompts you to either sign in or register for a Shutterstock account, ignoring the existence and widespread use of screenshot technology in a way that’s almost cute. The idea behind the template is that instead of participating in the gray area of editing and posting a photo one doesn’t have the rights to, people will use this tool to properly source, license, and download the distracted boyfriend stock photo and meme to their hearts’ content. Rather than chiding Hayden for participating in an activity that runs counter to its revenue model, Shutterstock embraced his template, with its publicity department touting it and even offering to connect me with Hayden for an interview. “It’s not allowed to use any image without purchasing the proper license in any possible way, so each one of the people that use the images without the license are doing it illegally,” he wrote, before adding, “this is not the thing that really worries us, as they are just a group of people doing it in good faith.” Still, he looked relatively charitably upon the meme’s spread. But “he sales that are related with the memes are probably a 0.00000% of our monthly revenue. He sells 1,600 photos a day and considers himself one of the top stock-photo sellers in the world. The Spain-based photographer behind the distracted boyfriend photos, Antonio Guillem, released a statement to reporters this week about the financial impact of his photo’s sudden virality: There really isn’t much of one. But stock photos don’t just appear out of thin air: Someone put time and effort into creating them, and they exist to make money through their use. Memes represent a certain kind of internet anarchy-a free-love vision of the web in which users spread and elaborate endlessly without care for who owns the original material. ![]()
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