Interior hall and doorway at Kensington Manor, an 1855 Renaissance Revival villa on the Kensington Plantation, Eastover, South Carolina

In 2015, documentary photographer Carol Highsmith received a letter from Getty Images accusing her of copyright infringement for featuring one of her own photographs on her own website. It demanded payment of $120. This was how Highsmith came to learn that stock photo agencies Getty and Alamy had been sending similar threat letters and charging fees to users of her images, which she had donated to the Library of Congress for use by the general public at no charge. In 2016, Highsmith has filed a $1 billion copyright infringement suit against both Alamy and Getty stating “gross misuse” of 18,755 of her photographs. “The defendants [Getty Images] have apparently misappropriated Ms. Highsmith’s generous gift to the American people,” the complaint reads. “[They] are not only unlawfully charging licensing fees … but are falsely and fraudulently holding themselves out as the exclusive copyright owner.” According to the lawsuit, Getty and Alamy, on their websites, have been selling licenses for thousands of Highsmith’s photographs, many without her name attached to them and stamped with “false watermarks.” (more: http://hyperallergic.com/314079/photographer-files-1-billion-suit-against-getty-for-licensing-her-public-domain-images/)

This is another AI-assisted collection, this time it features 20K+ images of manors. A manor is a large country house with lands, the principal house of a landed (country) estate. This collection took about 15 minutes to make, including adding about 18,000 relevant images as "manors" and removing portraits of people with "Manor" last names. Of course, image recognition was already done before and that process required much much longer time and machine resources. Please contact us if you need large image sets or need to tag your own large collections using our neural networks.