14 Feb 2012:
Reports coming in suggest the founder of phototime Jun Chen LI has left the company and is pursuing other opportunities. More about Jun Chen LI here – (open in Chrome browser to translate option)
Update 13 Feb 2012:
Reports coming in via email suggest Phototime may be closing next month.
UPDATE 25 Jan 2012:
Bruce B. Hopcus President and CEO of American International Associates a USA & International business bad debt collection agency has emailed PhotoArchiveNews.com having read our original article dated Jan 6:
Good morning Will,
I write to you this morning as I represent a UK company called Alamy, Inc. Our work is in Commercial International Bad Debt Recovery. I just read a posting from January 12, 2012 on your web site regarding the continued Illegal use of copy written photos by Phototime of China a.k.a. Beijing Starvision Science and Technology, Ltd.
This company has a considerable amount of money due to my client and does not respond to mail or email. However, I have tracked the ISP address to: CECT-Chinacomm Communications Co. Ltd. Their info can be found through a Google search. Anyone that is also experiencing this same problem should contact this company immediately and advise them of their responsibility under international copyright laws and request that the photos or the site be taken down immediately.
I have already sent out a “Cease and Desist” notice to the owner of the website and I have advised them of the continued Copyright Violations that they are perpetrating. I have also warned them that if they do not take down the Phototime website or suspend access to it we will notify the U.S. and G.B. State Departments of the continued violations.
Kind regards,
Bruce B. Hopcus
Bruce can be contacted in his New York offices here: www.aia-usa.com.
Jan 6 Jan 2012: Photoarchivenews reader Kim Jackson, owner at i love images photo agency in the UK has written to us with concerns about the China based stock photo library Photo Time. After receiving this letter we dropped a line to Photo Time a waited for a reply….nothing yet – so here is the warning:
Hi Will,
Happy New Year!
We would like to notify you that Phototime/Tuke in China ( www.phototime.cn and www.pt.tuke.com ) have been displaying our images on their website illegally.
We terminated our contract with them last year and they were asked to remove our collection from their website. We’ve heard from a former colleague at Phototime that they went under.
As of today, the website is still running and we still can find our images online.
So please share this information so that we can stop them from selling
images illegally.
Many thanks and best regards,
Kim
-ENDS-
We then asked Kim if her images were still being downloaded from the site – she replied: “We are pretty certain that you can still download if you have an account. They owe us money as well, not a lot but still it’s money. The big problem is that they have stopped communicating with us.”
If you have had a similar experience with Photo Time or know anything further please drop us an email: [email protected]