MadPixBiz: The Picture Business

Panic In The Stock Photo Industry: Yesterday Getty´s And Jupiter´s Stock Were Falling, Today PACA Is Offline, Closes Doors, Leaves The Country

GMT 11.00 AM. Network Solutions says:

pacaoffice.org

"This domain name (of the Picture Archive Council of America) expired on 11/07/2006 and is pending renewal or deletion".

 

[Update GMT 3.30 PM: PACA is back online]

© Illustration here.

MPEG-4 Content Protection Specification completed: Today We're Selling Digital Rights Management, Tomorrow We're Making Water Run Uphill

[© Perry Hoberman, Click on image to enlarge]

This is geek stuff! No one really cares! Do not read it nor try to understand it!
Don´t let the nice pictures fool you! We´re just obsessed with this MPEG-7 and MPEG-21 (metadata, digital rights management etc.) stuff since years, that´s all. But there´s a guy outside who seems to copy heavily word for word of some posts and makes money with it (hey, we got your static-non-over-the-fly-IP!). At least this posting cannot be copied - he won´t understand it! But it´s very important! What do y o u do now?


[© Perry Hoberman, Click on image to enlarge]

Charles Wiltgen, Apple's QuickTime Evangelist from 1996 to 1999 in "First baby-step to MPEG-4 DRM":

"SMA (Internet Streaming Media Alliance) has completed its MPEG-4 Content Protection Specification, and it’s now available for peer review for experts in network security, content protection and cryptography. The encryption method chosen for the new specification is based on the National Institute of Standards & Technology’s (NIST) 128-bit AES encryption standard. Importantly, this method is unencumbered by any additional royalty fees and intellectual property concerns. It’s also compatible with established IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) specifications. Many people seem to be misinterpreting this announcement as meaning, “Great! Now I can do DRM for MPEG-4!” However, the specification doesn’t specify a specific rights and key management system, and so doesn’t actually enable DRM (must less DRM interoperability) of any sort."

A reader responded:

"Mpeg-4 is dead before born. Nobody seems to be accepting it. Newer video codec H.264 is gaining huge momentum. Mpeg-4 tried to standardize lot of stuff which was its death knell. Startups focussing on mpeg4 are struggling. One of them laidoff majority of its employees. So news related to mpeg-4 like that of ISMA, m4if are just hype with no substance. People will just ignore hype and move to reality. Some may argue that h.264 is also part of mpeg-4. But who wants to use mpeg-4 to use the h.264 video codec !!"
[Related articles: "ISMA Pushes DRM for MPEG-4"; "Group prepares MPEG-4 encryption"]

We wonder if we will ever see the benefits in real life! Initially MPEG 7 should have enabled „Creation Information“, „Usage Information“ and „Media Description“ (storing and description of the content)  - all three not conformable with the IPTC standard - and MPEG 21 the allocation of usage rights, rights management and rights surveillance. Now we got that other improved  NewsML format associated with IPTC and it reads ("IPTC takes steps to simplify multimedia news exchange", 19 March 2004):

"In addition, IPTC members saw a presentation by Adobe explaining its XMP markup language, and how coding that supports IPTC's XML-based standards for photographers can be including in a future release of Adobe PhotoshopCS. For many years, thousands of photographers around the globe have been using the "IPTC header" to archive crucial data about photographs, including caption and location information. Adobe's new CS series of software will allow the IPTC header to be greatly expanded to include much richer detail and more standardized information about the content of images. This will greatly simplify the archiving and retrieval of images, even for organizations that are outside the news industry."

How does it fit? This is a strange situation for us. We cannot give the answer here simply because we don´t want to read the answer later anywhere else.*

But we got some cute starting points: ("The MPEG Video Standards – from 1 to 21"; 2; 3; "Today We're Selling Digital Rights Management, Tomorrow We're Making Water Run Uphill").

The answer to "Does it fit?" might be here (pdf-download for tracing and tracking **´s static IP-address).

Btw, the Annual General Meeting of IPTC takes place Hong Kong, 25 - 28 May (hurry up! hotels are always overbooked in Hongkong). If you want to get the background, sign up to the email group that NewsML maintains (here´s another one for EventsML) or to the RSS feed for metadata junkies).

[© Perry Hoberman, Click on image to enlarge]

*Hey **, do you fully understand the consequences of this MPEG 7 and NewsML thing? Or haven´t got a clue?

So beginning with this posting we´ll assign a new "**-relevance factor" (Copy-´n´-Paste factor) to each posting making it easier for ** to decide whether to hijack the bits of information provided here or not:

A factor of 10 indicates to ** a HIGHLY RECOMMENDED FOR COPY AND PASTE:
Your readers will like the stuff and if you´re not too sleepy in the morning and a master of the universe in that Copy-´n´-Paste thing, your readers will think: pretty great, overwhelming, this ** guy knows stuff!

whereas

A factor of 0 indicates to ** a LEAVE IT ALONE LET IT LAY WHO ACTUALLY CARES:
Your readers will not like the stuff presented here so there is no need for ** to sing the Copy-´n´-Paste melody; your readers will not fully understand if you play the Copy-´n´-Paste Rap simply because they are mostly five-years-too-late-adoptors.

[This posting: **-relevance factor 10. But that doesn´t help him because he doesn´t understand the content - maybe it´s scrappy? Or of utmost importance? Maybe he has to invest time, money and efforts to figure it out by himself?]

Start

Each time you start from scratch.