The first one is about a company stealing images from an accomplished Flickr user. Her name is Rebacca, she is from Iceland and makes gorgeous landscape pictures. A company in the UK called ‘Only Dreaming’ was selling her pictures… without her consent and without any compensation for Rebecca.

This sparked a heated thread on Flickr, understandably, which (overall) supported Rebecca and flamed ‘Only Dreaming’. Some of the posts went too far, containing threats toward the UK company and the Flickr-thread, including the pictures, were removed by Flickr management… which sparked yet another heated thread on both Flickr and other sites.

I myself fully support Rebecca, but the threads started to resemble mass blog-hysteria. Objectivity went out the door. Here is more about it from Rebecca’s blog:
Rebeccas Blog

Prisoner’s Dilemma

Smugmug is about to start a new service. It will offer their professional customers to sell stock photos. I am very curious how this will work out. However, how the following two issues are worked out will determine its success, in my opinion.

• Pricing: Can their customers (photographers) set their own pricing schemes for their stock?
• Search: The popularity rating of images determines the search results when agencies are looking for stock.

In short, how well will it work when Smugmug customers (photographers) compete with each other not only on the quality of their images but on pricing and ‘popularity’ as well. Will this work well for stock photography? This article can shed some light on this:
Stock Photography and the Prisoner’s Dilemma

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