The company just made tens of millions of its photos free for noncommercial use.
Heres's one of the quirks of the Internet: It can make illegal activity so simple to engage in that you can forget it's against the law.
Take image-sharing. If you find a photo, via Google Image Search or some such, that you want to publish on your blog (or tweet out to your followers, or use as your Instagram profile pic, or what have you), there is an extremely simple way to accomplish this: Download or screencap the image. Upload it. Boom. The Internet has shared its riches with you once again.
If you have engaged in this process with an image that happens to be from Getty, the massive digital photo agency, however ... then you are, I am sorry to tell you, a thief. You have violated Getty's terms of service; you have stolen its stuff; you have (screen)grabbed something that was not yours to grab in the first place.
If you are one of these digital outlaws, though, your thieving days may soon be behind you. Late yesterday, Getty announced a new system for photo-sharing on its platform: embeddability. Some 35 million(!) of the agency's photos are now free for pretty much anyone to share—for, at least, noncommercial purposes. Which is big news, not only for the web publishers whose ranks are growing daily, but also for what the move says—and concedes—about the digital economy as it exists in early 2014.
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