A settlement has been reached in the lawsuit brought by photographer Bert Stern against two men he accused of stealing images from his 1962 photo shoot with Marilyn Monroe.

The men, Donald Penny and Michael Weiss, who are also photographers, said they found images in the trash in the 1970s. Stern sued the men last September for $1 million and damages and demanded the return of the seven transparencies...

Stock photographers Roger Ressmeyer and Richard Minden are leading a $100 million class-action lawsuit against Getty Images over its Premium Access subscription plan. The Premium Access service is an unadvertised product that Getty offers its high-volume costumers.

Joining Ressmeyer and Minden are 84 other photographers, who claim that Getty has violated copyrights and contracts by including rights-managed images in the Premium Access product...

The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles has received gifts of nearly 500 pieces to its Department of Photographs since last year. The contributions came from more than 25 individual donors, including collectors, artists' estates and members of the Getty's Photographs Council.

The gifts included two photographs by Liu Zheng from his recent Peking Opera series, the first contemporary Chinese works to enter the Getty Museum's collection. The Getty has also augmented its already strong holdings of prints from Mexican photographers by adding works by Manuel Alvarez Bravo and Graciela Iturbide...

After filing for bankruptcy, Jacksonville, Fla.-based SuperStock has agreed to be bought out by a group of three other stock agencies. Blend, RubberBall and Glow Images outbid Masterfile at $2.8 million for the assets of SuperStock. Masterfile originally planned to spend $1.5 million for SuperStock.

The new joint venture, called RGB, aims to keep SuperStock in business. The companies, however, will remain separate. Blend's Lanny Ziering has been named CEO of SuperStock, which owns a collection of 110,000 images...

Time Inc. CEO Ann S.Moore announced another restructuring of the company's editorial divisions late last year. The reorganization, which was still ongoing at press time, is expected to result in about 600 layoffs, or roughly 6 percent of the media firm's workforce.

Moore aims to centralize the management by dividing its 24 magazines and their web properties into three units: news, entertainment and lifestyle. She says she hopes that this will lead to cross-collaboration between reporters and editors at various magazines. This is the third reorg under Moore since her appointment as CEO in 2002...

Google and Time Inc. have teamed up to bring more than 10 million images from Life magazine to users around the world. The free image portal contains collections from Life's Photo Archive, including some of the most iconic works of the 20th century by photojournalists such as Margaret Bourke-White, Gordon Parks and W. Eugene Smith.

Already, millions of Life images are available for viewing via Google Image Search. Once the online project is complete in the next few months, the archive will be among the largest professional photography collections on the web and one of the largest photo-scanning projects ever undertaken...

Getty Images and Jupiterimages are set to merge their services as part of a $96 million deal. At press time, the merger was scheduled to occur in early 2009.

As early as March 2007, Getty showed interest in acquiring Jupiterimages. A tentative deal valued at $388 million never materialized. Jupitermedia, the parent company of Jupiterimages, also received interest from four other buyers in 2008...

Alongside stock agencies, imaging companies are also facing large cuts in profits and jobs. Kodak, Sony and Canon have all reported losses in earnings, forcing them to lay off workers.

Eastman Kodak announced that it would eliminate up to 18 percent of its workforce, or 4,500 jobs, this January. This is up from its estimate last year that 1,500 jobs would be cut in 2009. The company reported marked decline in several of its key businesses last year. Sales of camera equipment fell 36 percent, for instance...

Amid layoffs, reorganizations and market imbalance, a number of photo stock agencies have decided to trim the royalty rates they pay for rights-managed images.

The changes began in September 2008, when Alamy announced that it would reduce its royalty rates from 65 percent to 60 percent. A few weeks later, during the 2008 PhotoPlus Expo, Corbis senior vice president Don Wieshlow said Corbis would lower its rates from a range of 45 to 50 percent to 40 percent as contracts come up for renewal...

It's not easy to encompass a clear vista of well over a million people in one image, but a new panoramic mount, called the GigaPan Epic, appears ready for the job.

Demonstrating the capabilities of the new motorized mount in spectacular fashion this January was photographer David Bergman, who created a monumental image of President Barack Obama's inaugural address. The panorama became an overnight sensation as one of the most viewed photos on the internet. In the first five days after the historic occasion, more than 2 million people in 186 countries viewed the image...