Lumaxart2d’s Gold Guys and the iPhone
Now, don't get me wrong. I am totally digging the work of Scott Maxwell (aka lumaxart2d), and his Gold Guy series is definitely top-notch. So before I continue, I just want to clarify that I'm not pouring on the hate.
However, this image (and a crapload others just like it) caught my attention recently while I was browsing Dreamstime searching for some royalty-free images for my latest project. It's just like any other Gold Guy image - cute and clever...but...how the hell did he get an entire series of iPhone images past the reviewers?!
I was specifically looking for touch-screen images of mobile phones a while ago, and I contacted an admin at Dreamstime to see if they could arrange that. Their response was short and sweet: the design of the iPhone is copyrighted, and therefore not allowed to be sold as stock. Hrmph...that shut me up for a while, until I saw this image a few days ago.
So what's the scoop? Lumaxart2d is definitely one of the top contributors at Dreamstime at the time of this writing, so is there some sort of special "club" for these types of members? I don't know. I'm not a contributor, so it doesn't bother me all that much. But it does strike me a little odd that there is this much inconsistency at a stock photo site as large as Dreamstime.
Okay, that's my rant for the day.
