iPhone Developer Too Cheap to Buy Icons [UPDATED]
It may be the season of good-will, but one naughty iPhone-developer has decided to play the role of Scrooge in the iTunes App Store.
Movies, created by French developer, Olivier Bernal, went live at the App Store on December 19. The app, retailing at $2.99, allows users to grab essential information on the latest box-office releases.
The icon for Movies clearly features a watermark from iStockphoto, a royalty free image library, implying that rather than purchase the master image, Bernal has pilfered the preview sample.
This particular iStockphoto license (including the ‘Electronic Items for Resale’ addendum) is available for 115 credits. At 95 cents per iStockphoto credit, this would be a one-off cost of $109.25. Bernal would therefore need to generate only 37 sales of Movies to cover the cost of the image license.
Achieving just 37 sales is hardly a difficult objective when you also consider that, in order to maximize the potential customer-base for his app, Bernal has created several iterations using the same icon, including Cinema and Cinema UK.
It seems that this may not be the first time Bernal has pilfered from iStockphoto. There are two more highly suspect app icons – TV Shows and Week Number of the Year. The TV Shows icon features a white diagonal line, quite possibly from an iStock Photo watermark. The latter of the pair, clearly uses an iStock Photo sample, titled Calendar – icon idea.
It’s not as immediately obvious as our prime suspect, but enlarging the app icon and then comparing it to the iStockphoto sample image, the original watermark is easily visible.
Sites such as iStockphoto provide a valuable service to organizations with limited design resources, allowing independent creatives to distribute royalty-free visual assets at reasonable rates. It’s therefore somewhat disappointing to see independent developers effectively stealing — surely they should understand the value of content generated by fellow independents?
Furthermore, setting aside development time and cost, distributing via the App Store is hardly prohibitive in terms of initial outlay: Apple charges a one-off fee to developers of $99. It seems that either saving a few bucks or just downright laziness on Bernal’s part led him to grab the sample imagery from iStockphoto.
The question is, now that Bernal has been called out on his immoral icon antics, what will his next move be? It’ll be most interesting to see how he handles the designers whose creations he has illicitly profited from; ideally, after a hasty apology, Bernal will be compensating them for their contribution to his App Store products.
Note that we’ve tried to reach Bernal for comment on the story but have yet to hear back. We assume he was too busy shoveling a mountain of coal from his stocking, stealing bonbons from children and kicking puppies.
UPDATE: We heard back from Mr. Bernal:
For [your] information, I bought the right to use the pictures this morning. You were right, at the beginning I first started with nothing and can’t afford to pay for the pictures, it’s perfectly normal to pay if I intend to continue to use it.
He says the updated, non-watermarked icons will be implemented with the next updates to the applications sometime in January.
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I can sypathize… One of my photos was stolen off of Flickr for the Trail Guru iphone app icon. I’m not sure yet how to approach the developer about it. I’m fine with him using the photo but would like to be credited for the shot at the very minimum since it’s a free app.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/abraysive/98422845/
@Devon B.: You should absolutely pursue this (you could report this to Apple for example). It is absolutely not OK to use someone else’s images/photos/artwork/software without consent. While these guys may give away the app for free, they most certainly are trying to squeeze money out of it through their web site and ads in the application. And it actually doesn’t matter at all whether or not they’re giving it away. They’re infringing your copyright and you shouldn’t let them get away with it.
J.
Have you notified iStockPhoto of the infringement? Stock photo companies are very strict when it comes to copyright abuse… I’d expect him to receive legal notices immediately demanding payment (and likely more than the “face value.”)
Apple would probably also remove the app from the AppStore if a DMCA complaint was filed with them.
This dood just got got on the internet.
one can buy icons for less than 99 usd. some of the icon designers are happy if someone asks them to design some artwork. on the other hand it might be an ‘advertising deal’. right now trillions of mac and iphone users read this post and now know for sure that istockphoto really exists…
So then it would be fair of me to ask the Trail Guru developer for $100 USD for a one-time non-exclusive license agreement for the usage of my photo to represent his software?
He wouldn’t even need to buy the extended license. If you read their site it says the extended electronic resale license if you are going to resell the image as part of say a template for e-cards or website templates, etc. If he is taking the image and then using it to build an icon he would only need to purchase the image which he could get for like $14. This is just pathetic. If he can’t/won’t pay for the image how can he expect people to pay for his app? Not to mention if he is willing to let that go out with the watermark then you can only guess how crappy the app will be.
looks like he’s changed the icon on the site (unless it was always different) after the backlash, but still hasn’t changed the “Week Number of the Year” app
When Loan Lite was first introduced into the App Store, it had a Pixelmator watermarked image for its screenshot. It’s since been fixed, but I thought it was funny enough to capture. Nothing infringing here, but still amusing. You can see it at http://bit.ly/15ZDq.
This is just pathetic. Why do these developers, who are probably new to Mac programming, suddenly think that they can STEAL images and that nobody would notice? It’s the sheer size of the iPhone audience that has them busted. How ridiculous and stupid to steal like that. And to think, they couldn’t even take the time to remove the watermark from the image? Talk about Gold Rush.