Today PicScout announced today that New York-based Index Stock Imagery chose its Image-Tracker Service to monitor the usage of more than 500,000 right-protected images of Index Stock databases.
The Image Tracker service is being adopted by stock photography agencies which seek a better way to monitor and enforce the use of right-protected images over the Internet. The service is based on PicScout’s image recognition and crawling technology.
Agencies can upload their copyrighted images into the PicScout servers which then crawl the web and detect images from the data base, even if they have been cropped, resized, or colorized. PicScout then provides detailed reports which form the basis to recapture lost revenue. By using this service, Index Stock hopes to improve the control of its library and benefit its artists by turning infringements into new sales opportunities because - according to PicScout - “Piracy is a major problem for the stock photography industry".
Index Stock Imagery was the first stock agency to begin storing and distributing images electronically. It started scanning its collection in 1992, and launched its first e-commerce site in 1994. The agency now has 650,000 images available online (its collection includes 75,000 Royalty Free images).
PicScout is a technology provider of the stock photography industry. The company offers solutions for image owners to control and protect their images. PicScout’s image recognition solution enables the comparison of image databases with individual images that are being used in commercial web sites.
Based on this technology, PicScout provides a number of services to the stock photography industry. These services enable stock photo agencies to enforce their copyrights, better control their assets, develop new billing methods and hopefully increase their customer base. Currently PicScout is already used by Zefa and Masterfile to identify unauthorized uses of images.
However we wonder what the future will bring. From our point of view enhanced image search technology, image recognition and image tracking technology will in the foreseeable future become a standard feature of nearly every professional content management system (kinda "add this feature to your order YES/NO") which finally brings up some questions regarding the business model of all companies in these playgrounds (we´ll discuss this later). Hints from the photographer community indicate that presumably a great number of photographers would be interested in using this technology. It will be the task of PicScout to address the needs of this customer audience which - in terms of money - does not have the financial possibilities of the great stock photo agencies.
