Interesting to see that Alamy are involved with this. I have firsthand experience dealing with them first as a photo contributor and later as a copyright holder finding Alamy to be in breach of both UK copyright law and also their own contributor agreement.
Alamy claim they delete all copies of contributor photos from their servers 45 days after you terminate your contract but failed to do this, and continued serving my images for many months after our agreement ended. When I contacted them they first claimed it was Google's fault (cached images) and them later admitted they had done it but were still defiant and claimed they could do it because finding my images was 'difficult'.
They are a large photo agency and their infrastructure is first-class, so I had some interesting email and telephone exchanges with Level 3 and AWS when I sent them DMCA takedown notices and explained that there was no 'safe harbor' for them and I had absolute proof (the Exif metadata with my name and copyright notice was still preserved in the images and I provided direct alamy.com/... links to them hosted by Alamy).
Blog post here, if you want the whole story including replies from Alamy. They seem like one of the better photo agencies but damn, they really don't like being held to the same standards they hold the public to. https://www.tombrossman.com/blog/2014/alamy-copyright-and-ex...
Alamy claim they delete all copies of contributor photos from their servers 45 days after you terminate your contract but failed to do this, and continued serving my images for many months after our agreement ended. When I contacted them they first claimed it was Google's fault (cached images) and them later admitted they had done it but were still defiant and claimed they could do it because finding my images was 'difficult'.
They are a large photo agency and their infrastructure is first-class, so I had some interesting email and telephone exchanges with Level 3 and AWS when I sent them DMCA takedown notices and explained that there was no 'safe harbor' for them and I had absolute proof (the Exif metadata with my name and copyright notice was still preserved in the images and I provided direct alamy.com/... links to them hosted by Alamy).
Blog post here, if you want the whole story including replies from Alamy. They seem like one of the better photo agencies but damn, they really don't like being held to the same standards they hold the public to. https://www.tombrossman.com/blog/2014/alamy-copyright-and-ex...