PicScout, Digimarc Join Forces . . .

Stock Asylum Staff Report

Infringing on copyrights of rights-managed photography and illustration may have just become harder with the announcement that two anti-theft technologies will be combined and a second announcement that one of the companies has extended its service to individual photographers.

Israel's PicScout, which uses sophisticated software to find infringements on the internet, and Digimarc, a U.S. company that supplies invisible watermarking technology, said they have formed a partnership that promises to strengthen efforts to stop illegal use of rights-managed imagery.

As part of the deal, Digimarc will start using PicScout's internet crawling technology to power the U.S. company's own internet searches. In addition, the two companies will jointly create improvements to Digimarc ImageBridge, which is also designed to find protected images on the internet.

In another matter, Picscout ( See our recent article about the company ) recently started offering its service to individual photographers. Until now, the service was available only to stock photography distributors with large collections.

Photographers can have the company search the internet for up to 500 images a year for a $178 subscription fee and 30 percent of recovered licensing revenues. The subscription fee includes one territory such as the United States, United Kingdom or Germany. For additional fees, photographers can upload more images or add additional territories.

Image creators can sign up for the service and upload their images on the PicScout web site. Uploaded images need to be in the jpeg format, no larger than 100 kilobytes in size.

As the stock industry has moved to selling digital imagery over the internet during the last decade, copyright theft has become an increasingly serious problem. Stock suppliers are turning to companies like Digimarc and PicScout to help find infringers and force them to pay.

The services are especially useful in protecting rights-managed stock because image distributors keep careful records about sales and can easily identify unlicensed uses. It is, however, much harder to track illegal uses of royalty-free stock photography.

 

PicScout can be found at: http://www.picscout.com

Digimarc is at: http://www.digimarc.com