Hi All. Hope everyone is doing well. I wanted to share a few rather serious issues to be aware of particularly if you shoot destination footage. So a few months ago I’m surfing on shutterstock checking out my clips and I notice about 3000 of my own destination clips are being sold under a new user. All of these 3000 clips had the the same titles as mine, all editorial clip dates from 2010-2023 are all changed to 2023 and the user profile only shows a person in a country in Africa. I could not fathom how this could happen. I contact support and they want me to proceed with dmca at first for each clip which would take weeks. Eventually I get a hold of someone from legal and they were able to close down that account in about 1 week from my initial contact with them. What a relief. It had been active with my 3000 clips for several months before i caught it. If you contribute footage to any other stock sites please check your titles and see if there are duplicates reposted by other users. Try searching the titles in quotes. I checked all the other stock sites to see if anyone may have purchased 3000 clips but this wasn’t the case. The only way this would be possible would be with an unlimited download account and Envato is the only such entity I contribute to which offers unlimited downloads for about $16.
On to the next issue. If you shoot destination footage and sell on envato check your destinations on youtube. There are hundreds of channels which are taking our 4k videos and upscaling them to 8k, 12, and magically making them into hdr, atmos, etc. No biggie there, If you want to believe your watching 12k hdr oled atmos videos taken with a dji mini 4 pro be my guest. The issue is many are indicating that they have the copyright and are offering to license the videos and are using single licenses or no licenses across multiple channels which are all a violation of envatos single use license terms. It would take an army of staff to monitor and enforce all of this. I’ve contacted a few of the youtubbers and the typical response I get is they don’t have any license for the content on their channel or are getting the clips from a 3rd party from a different country because their country does not allow licensing of the clips. I have no idea what that even means. If you shooting Hawaii, NYC, Miami, Bali, LA, beaches, dubai or any other amazing destination, go and search out those videos on youtube. They will usually have a bright and beautiful thumbnail photo to attract viewers. If you see your stock clips in those videos they might have been licensed by 1 account holder and shared with several people on multiple projects. Take care everyone and protect your work.