Pretty much. From source [1]:

  All rights holders are certainly entitled to enforce their
  legitimate rights in a legitimate way. But they should not
  be permitted to do so in a manner that is abusive and/or to
  misuse these rights.

>Seems as if Getty is exploring what could be a fine solution, that I'll probably use.

I would advise against this solution, over hosting your own images for some of these reasons:

- Accessibility issues: embedded images link target _blank to an unrelated page and source shows a lack of an alt-attribute and link description.

- Privacy issues: Embedding adds user tracking for Tumblr, Twitter and Getty Images. Unclear what is done with this data and which companies have access to it.

- Security issues: Embedding adds a third party website to your site, with all ability to execute code. Do you know for sure that Getty Images will disclose a hack, that their security is up to par with their target size?

- SEO issues: Google image results and iframed externally hosted duplicate images without a user-specifiable alt-attribute do not work well together. Furthermore you can't enrich your content with media, which may hamper web search results.

- Continuity issues: You won't know how aggressive, or low-quality the future advertisements will be. If your site happens to trigger for a porn related term, you run the risk of them bouncing your referrer (or breaking out of i-frame) for breaking their terms. Will you be notified if they discontinue an embedded image and what will the replacement content look like? How fast could you replace a few months worth of images if you want to switch?

- Legal issues: Their terms are clear. You can't use it commercially. So if you ever add advertising to your site or somehow monetize it, you run the risk of skirting the terms of service of a company that is known to aggressively litigate. You put your users at risk of downloading the image, hosting it somewhere, and getting fined, and you yourself probably run an increased risk, increased attention from Getty Images, when you embed their images. I know I would like to know what keywords appear on a page where my images are embedded, I know legal would probably like to add a PicScout scan to that crawler. BTW PicScout is known to report non-public placeholder images stored in hidden dev directories (http://www.extortionletterinfo.com/forum/getty-images-letter...)