"If you can't beat 'em, join 'em" seems to be the philosophy behind Getty's decision to make some 35 million images available for free, legal download.
Countless Getty images have spread throughout the Internet despite the licensing company's team of lawyers, Bloomberg Businessweek reported.
Getty, which makes profit based on individuals, stock photo agencies and media companies paying for licensing, has announced a new program that allows millions of images to be embedded into web page. The pictures are completely free as long as they are for noncommercial use.
Controlling the "tens of millions" of photos that have been shared illegally throughout the reaches of the Internet is well-nigh impossible, so Getty decided to try to use the ubiquity to its advantage.
"There are two ways to look at the world," Craig Peters, a senior vice president at Getty, told Bloomberg. "People sharing content without a license is an issue--or it's an opportunity."
He compared the photo-sharing to the music industry before the advent of iTunes. People didn't have a legal way to obtain songs digitally, but music was inevitably downloaded anyway.
The free Getty images, which can be embedded just like a YouTube video, won't be legal for download for promoting products or businesses.
"That's a pretty clear delineation," Peters told Bloomberg. "We'll enforce the terms of this license if people start using these images to do that."
According to Bloomberg records, Getty has filed just seven lawsuits for copyright infringement in the last five years even though the company routinely sends letters to guilty parties.
The free images can be found here for use on blogs, Twitter, Tumblr and more. Search for an image and then copy and paste the embed icon underneath the picture to use.
See Now: OnePlus 6: How Different Will It Be From OnePlus 5?
