They are doing the right thing. It is not the same as PD or ML, these are just plain wrong... What PSC is doing is protecting the value of their collection with this. It is not excluding photographers from their business, what they want are images that have not been sold a gazillion times for a few dollars. The value of a collection lies not in its net number of images, but in the uniqueness of these and the "unavailability" of these at other outlets.
It seems that many people think that micros is the only way to do things. After the embarrasment of MSI and ASUS licencing the same RF image just a week ago (from Getty...) it has become obvious to many designers that one thing is a great price and another is to have the same image that everyone has. For a multimillion dollar company (and for a smaller company too) it is important to have the right image, even if it means to pay 50 dollars.
Micro images should remain micro. MidStock should do the same. Traditional agencies will expect (and demand) that images submitted to them are licenced as traditional images always, with no crosslicencing.
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