 In this video I'm going to review how Shutterstock responded to my complaint about thieves taking my photos and selling them on their site. I'm also going to go over why I think Shutterstock is legally responsible to do more to stop these copyright thieves. I know this is a follow up video to a video that I did about how to figure out if thieves are stealing your photos and putting them on Shutterstock. If you haven't seen that video I'll put a link to it up around here somewhere so you can check that out first if you want. Now in that video I sent Shutterstock a DMC takedown notice for 13 of my photos that other people had uploaded to their site and were selling them. And 8 days later they got back to me saying that they took down those photos. Now this email is obviously a template written by lawyers to respond to DMC takedown notices. But I kind of find these couple of sentences weird for them to put in there. I'll let you read them here. Moreover Shutterstock is a service provider as such term is defined by the US Digital and Monial Copyright Act. As a service provider Shutterstock will remove any image identified in a proper DMC takedown notice. Now it's kind of weird they add that stuff about service provider isn't it? I've got three kids and if I go to my 4 year old and say hey what did you do today? And he says I'm a good boy I didn't break anything. Well I didn't ask you if you broke anything so now I'm pretty sure if I go around the house I'm going to find something broken. It's the same here with Shutterstock. You're seeing that I did some digging into the definition of service provider in the DMC takedown law and what I found is pretty surprising and I'll get into that later in the video. First after I received this email from Shutterstock I went and I checked all 13 of the photos and all of them did give me an error on the Shutterstock website. So those thieves were no longer making money selling my photos on Shutterstock. That being said if I go and look at the similar photos I can still see those links there and I can still see the images or if you click on those links you basically get an error. So A for effort Shutterstock but you didn't quite takedown all the offending photos. Now the next thing I checked was if the thieves who took my photos and uploaded them to Shutterstock were still selling other photos there and what I found was of the 11 people who took my photos and uploaded them to Shutterstock only one of their accounts were suspended. So 90% of the thieves were still allowed to sell photos on Shutterstock even after I notified Shutterstock about the copyright infringement. Now it is possible the rest of the photos in these thieves portfolios were their own but I really doubted so I decided to check one out. This particular person uploaded two of my photos and had over 600 other photos on Shutterstock. So I decided to go in and use Google reverse image search on the photos to see if I could find them elsewhere on the web. Now I found a lot of these images on the Shopify birth site taken by different photographers so I think it's a pretty good bet that this person has downloaded well over 600 photos off the web and uploaded them to Shutterstock and is probably making a bit of money off it each month. Now I contacted a couple of these photographers asking them if they would send a DMCA takedown notice to Shutterstock to get the photos taken down. I really would like to see how many DMCA takedown notices Shutterstock has to receive about one contributor before they go ahead and disable their account. Now if you're interested to see how many it takes and see the follow-up in this I will post another video on it so make sure you go down and subscribe to the channel and turn on the notifications if you haven't done so already. So how would I rate Shutterstock's response to my DMCA takedown notice? I'd probably give them about a three out of ten. They did respond to me after eight days which isn't fast but I think it's a reasonable amount of time and they did take down the photos so they couldn't be sold anymore but they missed the similar images so my photos are still up there on Shutterstock as well as they didn't ban the contributors so I really think there's a lot of room for improvement in how Shutterstock handles these DMCA takedown notices. Now going back to Shutterstock's response to them being a service provider I think the original intention of the DMCA lie was to protect internet service providers from people doing bad things on the internet without their knowledge and it's a good idea it would have been hard for the internet to become what it is today if internet service provider were being sued every single time something somebody did something bad on the internet. However I think Shutterstock is stretching it a little calling themselves a service provider and here's why let me go and read this from the actual law. Service provider shall not be liable for monetary relief for infringement of copyright by reason of the storage at the direction of a user of material that resides on a system or network controlled or operated by or for the service provider. If the service provider does not receive a financial benefit directly attributable to the infringing activity in a case in which the service provider has the right and ability to control such activity. So what this law is saying is that if a service provider isn't making money directly from the copyright infringement and there's no way for them to stop it then they're not liable. Now I'm not a lawyer but I don't think that's the case here for Shutterstock. Shutterstock is directly making money off the sale of the copyright infringement material because they take a cut of each sale as well as they have the technology to be able to stop this copyright infringement from happening. Now I don't have the interest of the time to get into illegal battle with Shutterstock but I kind of hope somebody else does to force them to take action to stop this type of thing from happening. Let me know what you think about this in the comments. Now when I hear back from the other photographers but whether they sent DMC takedown whether this is from Shutterstock I'll post another video about how difficult it was to get these thieves banned from selling photos on Shutterstock. If you're watching this in the future I'll have a link to the next video up here. If not this is probably just a link to something that YouTube thinks you'll like. Now if you like this type of video make sure you give it a thumbs up. 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