Stock Photos vs Unwatermark.ai: Is It Possible to Get Crisp, Clean Previews for Mockups? - Mid-day

A scrappy startup is offering to strip watermarks from stock photos with a single click, potentially upending a business model that has generated billions for Getty Images and competitors who rely on those digital barriers to drive paid downloads. The tool raises thorny questions about intellectual property in an era of increasingly capable AI—and whether copyright protections designed for the pre-digital age can survive technology that makes them trivial to circumvent. Photographers and stock photo agencies are bracing for a reckoning over whether watermarks will soon be as quaint as DVD copy protection.

Mid-day·Mar 18