A
stock photography vendor founded by
Bill Gates. They are using their immense financial resources to buy up huge
swathes of the world's collected
imagery and turn a profit on it. The
Bettman Archive, for example, was the world's largest collection of
public domain images and films. Remember the
Hindenburg burning at
Lakehurst? What about
Neil Armstrong on the Moon?
Ansel Adams? Just about every photo of great
jazz musicians you've ever seen is owned by Corbis. They recently bought the archives of the
Sygma news agency, suggesting intent to move into
realtime news.
Bettmann himself said of the deal that Gates was buying History.
As a designer, I never buy Corbis stuff because I consider that sort of acquisitiveness to be both evil and bad for the market. Unfortunately, for some images, particularly historical and photojournalistic ones, there's now no other source.