Getty Images files for bankruptcy amid mounting debt and AI competition
https://nypost.com/2026/10/22/business/getty-images-files-for-bankruptcy-amid-mounting-debt-ai-competition/Open linkView original on piefed.zipSyndicated from the fediverse. Read and engage on the original instance.
View original on piefed.ziphttps://nypost.com/2026/10/22/business/getty-images-files-for-bankruptcy-amid-mounting-debt-ai-competition/Open linkView original on piefed.zip
60 replies
damn, hopefully they get acquired by a European company.
Did all that gas station money dry up?
This was meant as a joke, then I realized that this is capitalism and it might actually be the same family/company
Not that I’m fond at all of Getty, but the fact that people are using AI slop instead of real photographs is disappointing.
Getty Fucked
I had an intern use a Getty Image he found on the open internet, on our website by accident. We got maybe 100 visitors in a week. He didn't know it was a Getty images, but yes, he should have cleared the image first. Somehow Getty found it and tried to sue us for thousands of dollars. Literally thousands, the number was completely ridiculous. Luckily I had good legal representation and he got it down to 500 dollars, which is still ridiculous for a small mistake.
Get fucked, Getty
$500 seems pretty fair. It was genuine copyright infringement of a paid product for commercial use.
Getty will steal other people’s photos on the Internet and sue the original photographer for using their own work. They do this all the time. Fuck Getty.
Sauce? I need something to be mad about today. Alas, I searched for getty sues original photographer and came up with articles about photographers suing Getty, but not the other way around.
They sued for thousands so in the end it would be $500. If they asked $500 up front, it would have been $50.
How is it possible to lose money when your whole business model is based on theft?
Literally, what are their expenses?
They had to pay out over $100 million to some hedge fund/VC groups after losing a lawsuit about denying their use of stock warrants. This had been ongoing since 2022 but the final ruling was last quarter.
Also they took on another $100 million or so of debt in anticipation of the Shutterstock merger which fell through.
Lawyers on retainer.
maintenance, mostly
Paying their lawyers to sue people
Parasitic IP rent seekers can go to hell.
I love this for them!
So, nothing is lost? OK, moving on.
Uplifting news
Soon all stock photo image sites will close and we will just have AI images for everything. Uplifting news?
Maybe just the ones that won't sue you for your life's savings if you accidentally use one of their publicly available images on a random ass website receiving 50 visitors a month will survive. The ones people don't actively hate.
I say we just start using text for everything. No more images. Everything would go so much faster. User Interfaces would be so much cleaner too
Because I love companies selling historical images that should be public domain and than adding their fucking watermark to all images of theirs that appear in search engines. Fuck Getty Images.
I saw someone on YouTube made a image archive of a ton of public domain videos and images that is easy to use like Getty. Don’t remember the title though. Was a cool idea.
Well fuck all stock photo companies too then eh?
Cut out the worthless middle man. Hire a photographer.
The "worthless middleman" provides images immediately at a much lower cost then hiring a photographer and a helicopter in another country.
Have any idea what a photographer costs?
No money. What now?
I don't have all the answers. I just think it's outrageous to have to pay for a photo of Kurt Cobain. I fucking hate Getty Images.
Haha well yeah, in that case I agree that any photo of him has at this point made the money it’s gonna make and it should be free.
As opposed to the previous trend of getty greedily monopolising the industry, stealing images that they don't own copyright for and using their lawyers to mute smaller competitors they steal from? In this case AI is the lesser of two evils. If you don't hate getty, you simply don't know enough about them.
The better news is that Getty is going tits up, then the AI bubble will burst and we won't have to deal with so much of that bullshit either.
The ai bubble bursting and hardware prices crashing would make local gen even more affordable.
Which means cheap generic ass stock filler imgs would be easy and accessible for everyone.
Fuck ai, but fuck getty more. Anything that undermines them is good.
Plenty of open source image sites at this point
That are good and have new stuff for free with no attribution? Example please?
https://pixabay.com/
Why is asking a question downvoted? Would be useful to provide examples when making a claim
Because people come to the internet to get dopamine. Here’s a fun tip: use a client that allows you to hide all votes. That way you aren’t ever influenced by vote manipulation. Then when people say, “your opinion is being downvoted [by my bot army]” you can say, “don’t know, don’t care, lmfao”
This exactly. Whats even worse, is that so many stock sites now try to pivot fully to AI. As someone who regularly uses stock images and videos at work this is so annoying. I don't want a fucking inbetween platform to AI generate some slop. Now more then ever there would be value in a site that gives me 100% real images. Like say if I want to illustrate a video about Peru i want videos that were actually shot there etc...
I was looking for graphics the other day and the stock images sites I've used before were virtually all AI slop. Why would I pay for that?
Unsplash.
Honestly... I rather have ai stock imgs then getty. The entire point of stock it's is they are place holder or filler imgs.
They are purely functional in nature. Ai is fine for that more or less.
An image of a few people sitting around a corporate office, pointing at charts. I’m totally fine with AI here.
Slippery slope - straw man argument, nothing in the post you respond to says that.
LMAO, GET FUCKED!
getty fucked
Lol get fucked
Oh no! Anyway.
AI does something good for once
Our first president is finally bankrupt.
If someone invented a machine that did nothing but roam the streets at night and hunt down orphans, and if that machine somehow led to Getty going bankrupt as a byproduct, it would probably still get a cheer out of me.
I don't like orphan killing machines, but I'll take a silver lining whenever I can. I guess I'm an optimist like that.
That is a disturbingly malleable moral stance. I love it.
It's peak humanity. It really is a fantastic show of the double standards and mental gymnastics that define what it is to be human.
Chaotic good.
Uhm, what?
Getty and Shutterstock Unite in AI-Driven Era: A New Chapter for Stock Photography
Evidently this AI system does not include dates on these news stories though. This one is old.
You didn’t read OP’s link, huh?
This is
redditlemmy, we don't waste our time with things like readingRead and nuance is for the bird! We do snap reactions and hot takes around here!
Lemmy is such a fun duality of positive vibes and absolutely brain dead hate band wagons.
Better than reddit that's only hate bandwagons tho.