C-Registry.us tracks web pirates who prefer stealing to dealing while enabling users to find and contact owners for permission to use their “orphaned works”
New York, NY, June 22, 2009. A new technology suddenly makes it possible for amateur and professional photographers whose work gets stolen online to track down the Madison Avenue ad agencies and Internet businesses that are ripping them off. Empowered with visual recognition and bulk upload capability, creators and rights holders now have both a stick and a carrot for web users of their copyrighted content.
Millions of times every day, people find images online they want to use, but there’s no photo credit and no way to contact the photographer.
Most unknown images result from pirating, which often sheds ownership information when content is copied without authorization.
The Copyright Registry at C-Registry.us makes it easy for users to find content creators and for those creators to find online uses of their creative works. With a simple click of a browser bookmark, users can find and contact the owner of an image that appears at any web site worldwide, including stolen and modified copies the photographer doesn’t even know exist.
C-Registry.us has added two powerful functions to help identify online content owners and usages - bulk upload of URLs and image recognition. Photographers, photo agencies, newspapers and other rights holders can now directly upload massive text exports that describe the ownership and online location of their image files. Coupled with pattern recognition, this makes it possible for every copy of that content to link back to its owner. Knowing who owns each photo is an essential step for users to get permission to publish copyrighted work, which includes all artistic creations from a child’s drawing and family snapshots to news coverage of celebrities and events. By law, creative works are copyrighted at the moment of creation.
Every authorized use of a photo, a song or a video exposes it to dozens of unauthorized uses. A growing quantity of unattributed copies are at risk of being mistaken for “orphaned works”, a term with potential legal and financial implications that describes when the owner of a creative work cannot be identified or found. C-Registry.us enables the owner of online creative works to be found from any copy, including versions that are altered. When users click the C-Registry.us bookmark, this patent-pending technology will first check for an exact match of the images on that web page, then suggest the most likely owner whose content is extremely similar if there is no exact match. This extends the reach far beyond the exact content that is being verified. With the newly found power to insist on proper permissions, creators can now say “Play nice or pay the price”.
“There are two types of images online,” says C-Registry.us cofounder Randy Taylor, “those that are used without authorization, and those that are going to be. Our unique solution makes it easy to find the owners of the billions of unauthorized copies of copyrighted intellectual property while simultaneously monitoring uses of that content.”
At June’s Copyright Summit in Washington DC, U.S. Senator Orrin Hatch described an annual loss of $58 billion to piracy, adding “… artistic works and other commercially-viable products created out of one’s own mental processes deserve the same protection under the law as any other tangible product or piece of real estate. Appallingly, many believe that if they find it on the Internet, then it must be free.” C-Registry.us now makes proper licensing possible for massive quantities of images online by making it easy for users to find and contact the rights holder from unidentified content, filling an important gap in the licensing process.
Though its proprietary technology also functions for music and video, the C-Registry.us web site is focusing first on images because more sites use images than any other media type. Some estimates say there are three trillion images online and that only one out of 100 is properly credited. Once limited to professional researchers and photo specialists, interest in copyright is reaching mainstream awareness, thanks in part to the billions of image files that are uploaded monthly to photosharing and social community sites like Flickr, Photobucket and Facebook.
The basic service of C-Registry.us is free, which includes finding owners with one-click image recognition. Registered users can pay a $25/year authentication fee to bulk upload their URL paths and related data via the web interface at C-Registry.us. A tutorial video on “How To Bulk Upload Image URLs” and simple upload instructions are available online at http://www.c-registry.us/pages/index.php?pID=60.
About The Copyright Registry
The Copyright Registry is a service of StockPhotoFinder.com, Inc., a
New York based technology provider for creative industries whose other
services include a stock photo search engine. StockPhotoFinder is a
charter member of the Leadership Circle of the PLUS Coalition, the
international standards body for the image licensing industries. As a
leading contributor to the PLUS initiative, StockPhotoFinder designed
the numbering system behind the PLUS Media Matrix. “The Copyright
Registry”, “C-Registry”, “C-Registry.us” and “Play Nice or Pay The
Price” are trademarks of StockPhotoFinder.com, Inc..
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