Apparently Picapp is having some hiccups. As per many posts in their forum, Picapp has been supplying non authorized images to bloggers worldwide for free.
Apparently Getty was supposed to only put their wholly owned images via the Picapp service. That is images either produced by staff photographers or bought outright. But by some API fluck ( that is the official version, at least) images from commissioned photographers also appeared.
Apparently, the issue is currently being solved but if I were a Getty contributor, I would check if my images are made available. There filtering system does not seem to be very efficient. The most amusing part of all this? Picapp is run by Picscout, an anti copyright infringement service. I guess you can’t trust anyone these day…
Paul – We have been told by Getty Images and by PicScout that the intent is indeed only for wholly-owned content to be made available and this is a mistake.
As of this morning a search on PicApp site will no longer return Creative images. Programming changes are in process.
Bloggers using this service do not get actual images but just some javascript that will serve up the image with embedded ads.
In this way every use and every view can be tracked.
David Sanger
SAA – Stock Artists Alliance