So far away from it all

November 2, 2007 by pmelcher.

Not a good time of the year for those of us who are not playing the stock market. All the photo news site change (or is it because it is Halloween ?) from photo buffs to Wall Street experts. Some stayed up all night to be the first to report while others where updating their blogs while listening in. One would have thought a man was landing on the Moon. The giant has stumbled, they say, some even predict its imminent downfall, the lilliputians have finally won against the big bad Gulliver of photography. Getty released it quarterly report.

I personally see a company who keeps on growing, on generating more revenue than any other photo agency in history, that is not afraid to innovate and to take risks and who is now about to redirect its general focus to bypass its own clients to reach its consumers directly. Something I mentioned in Photo agency 3.0.

Hint: It is not because a company’s stock drops that it is out of business or will be. Take a look a Microsoft stock once in a while.

Anyway, while Gulliver scares the pants out of the Wall Street-obsessed lilliputians, its shadowy friends, Corbis the Corbis ( how else to describe them ?) have again taken the world by surprised. A few months after launching Snapvillage.com, they have posted a new contributor agreement, effective August 31, 2007, but only posted a month later, on September 27. Most of the contract is all about changing the legal name of Snapvillage, and adding some very threatening comments that is not particularly contributor-friendly. One would think that if you have a UGC company, you would have an agreement that doesn’t scares the pants out of those Users. Corbis is afraid of no one, not even its own contributors who find themselves forced to fly to Ireland if they need to sue Snapvillage and pay all legal fees even if they win. Furthermore, the agreement makes no efforts to be readable by the common man. Quite the opposite. So much for being user friendly.

However, the really interesting part is that the whole company has been legally moved to Ireland, under a shell company:

SnapVillage Ltd.
Attn: Matsack Trust Limited
70 Sir John Rogerson’s Quay
Dublin 2
Ireland

The Matsack company websites clearly specifies : Our in-house company Matsack Trust Limited acts as Company Secretary for several hundred client companies, comprising public, private, unlimited companies …

Mmm…Now everyone knows that Corbis will do anything to protect its very wealthy and only stockholder, Bill Gates, from any possible liabilities. Fair enough. This agreement does not even mention Corbis at all. But Ireland ? and a empty company ? Well, an article on the American Chamber of Commerce explains it all :

“These [benefits] include Ireland’s open and transparent tax regime, a standard 12.5% corporation tax rate which applies to all companies. Equally important are the double taxation agreements with 44 countries and the favourable [sic] tax incentives given to intellectual property and to Research & Development investment. ”

A tax shelter. Apparently, Corbis’ idea of making a profit is to pay less taxes overall, and none in the USA at all.

Talking about contracts, I was lucky enough to see the one offered by Moodboard ( the one with the cool website). It demands, from a professional photographers, a 10 year, worldwide exclusive agreement with a 20 % pay off.

Even the sleaziest microstock agreement does not fall that low. What is it, I must ask, that Moodboard does with these images that justify them to take a whopping 80 % ? We are talking about images that they have not produced, paid for, arranged, edited, or even captioned and that they intend to license at a midstock price. And who in their right mind would ever sign this ? Where are the EPUK guys when you need them ? The SAA , ASMP and other “P” named association ? how can they tolerate this under the same Union Jack flag ? What is the Queen doing about this ?

Posted in Midstock, license, No sense, finance, getty, corbis, Royalty free | Print | 3 Comments »