I need images to seed my stock photo site, and I have been bribing photographers to take a chance on my site. So on a whim, I went to Ebay and searched for stock photography. There are many people selling huge collections on DVD's through Ebay. I wrote to a few of them, and it appears they have no concept of what "Royalty Free" means, and they certainly don't have the copyright to the photos. They made it clear that if I bought their collections (for a few dollars) that I would have the right to resell them as if they were my own. I'll steer clear of them, of course. Anyway, it appears people are just subscribing to iStockPhoto, downloading massive amounts of photos, and reselling them illegally. Does that worry anybody, or does it not really affect your income?

YES it hurts the income. In my opinion the little guy (eBay shopper) is my target market, if he buys 10,000 for $5. We all just lost out on a lot of money.

On the other hand, he will never use 5% of those in any real situation. One things that I have learned with my own purchased collections is that it is almost worth it to throw the image away and pay another $5 than try and find out what you own. Basically, what I mean is that its the index that you need, a good way to sort through the images. Normallt eBay CDs or any massive collection doesn't have an effective way to do this.

Please post the URL of the auction if you can remember, I would like to look through for any of my photos and notify agencies of the theft. You can also notify eBay if you find some that are obviously stolen.

Well, here is one I was specifically thinking of:

cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&a...name=ADME:B:AAQ:US:1

He's got my email address, so don't do anything to make him retaliate against me...

You have a good point about finding what you want in that haystack, although I believe I remember that they were at least organized into categories.

Perhaps it makes more sense to charge more for individual stock photos. Then you at least get more upfront before they get spread around. I guess it depends on how unique the photos are. I've always wondered how some photos go for hundreds while others go for pennies.