Offers Industry-Wide Opportunity to Expose Every Licensable Image With Licensor Information at Real-Time Point of Encounter; Every Image Credited With Visible Source and Connected for Legitimate Use and/or Purchase
Silicon Valley, CA, Oct. 07, 2009. PicScout, the market leader in worldwide image services, today launched a services platform and a new product that enables client image monetization opportunities across the global landscape of the internet. For the first time, users of web-viewed images will be made immediately aware of images’ rightful owners or licensors and afforded an easy connection with them. PicScout is bringing both users and purveyors of images together online and on-the-fly to contract for legitimate image downloads for authorized usage on or offline.
Though every image by default is copyrighted for use, until now images have not always been visibly credited when viewed online. Equipped with a free PicScout Image Exchange™ add-on, image buyers surfing, searching, stumbling or visiting a particular site are able to identify images indexed by the Image IRC. Seeing a universally used “i" information icon, a user clicking on the icon exposes metadata that identifies the image’s owner or licensor and the connecting links to buy/use the image directly from the licensor.
“We believe that most people are prepared to do the right thing, especially when the right thing is quick and easy to do, as we’ve made possible with ImageExchange. Users of the ImageExchange Firefox add-on will see icons associated with images anywhere online. Thus, PicScout makes sure that every image gets its credit, and makes buying and tracking images simple,” said PicScout CEO Offir Gutelzon.
“If people can find the image they want, see how much it costs, and how to buy it, most people will proceed gladly to connect with buyers and transact with speed and efficiency. PicScout has realized the way for everyone involved, from the creative professional, to the stock agency and photographer, to achieve full satisfaction. We are very excited to introduce our plans to the industry, the internet, and the world and to continue innovating on behalf of our clients.”
While the consensus is that the photo license industry is a $2 billion market, most also agree this estimate represents only a part of the true market size when factoring in all image uses, both legitimate and non-legitimate. By giving credit to every online image and facilitating immediate use and/or purchase, PicScout engenders a much larger and more apparent marketplace.
With today’s announcement unveiling the industry’s opportunity to have every licensable image appear with licensor information, PicScout moves to a Services Platform designed to utilize the company’s proprietary image fingerprinting recognition technology to inform, equip, and deliver a suite of products– the first new product being ImageExchange, which facilitates connections between image owners and image buyers. With the news, PicScout complements a previously established reactive model for non-legitimate usage with a proactive one that enables immediate recognition of licensable images.
According to September 2009 reporting by the LA Times http://tinyurl.com/p9wg9s, Getty Images reports 42,000 examples of copyright infringement per year, and Corbis claims to uncover 70,000 violations annually. PicScout, through its proven and highly scalable fingerprinting image recognition technology, has established that 85 percent of rights-managed images detected on commercial websites are non-legitimate uses. Yet, in 2008 an online survey from KRC Research, undertaken for iStockphoto, revealed that 33 percent of Americans use downloaded digital content, but nearly 30 percent are unaware that permission is required for its use.
Both users and owners of images are often frustrated by an inability to connect online for legitimate use. While most individual images for web use can be bought for $49 or less, according to Daryl Lang of PDNPulse.com, infringement can be costly for unwitting innocents, with fees accruing over time escalating to $1000 or more. While policing the internet for infringement has been necessary to attempt to maintain legitimacy for the industry, it’s not an optimal scenario and begs the PicScout ImageExchange.
In a separate announcement made today - October 7, “PicScout Unveils Services Platform and Suite of Products to Enable Online Image Transactions for Users and Licensors” - the company reveals the technology, platform and products that support the PicScout Online Image Marketplace and new model for online image transactions.
About PicScout
Founded in 2002, PicScout™ www.picscout.com , is the worldwide leader in image tracking and enabler of client image monetization services. Through its proprietary and highly scalable image recognition technology, PicScout created the image copyright protection marketplace through its widely used ImageTracker™ product and is now leading the way for image commerce to become a legitimate Internet economy. A financially independent, privately held company, PicScout has offices in the Silicon Valley, Chicago and Hertzelia, Israel. The company’s products ImageTracker™ and ImageExchange™ utilize the company’s Image IRC™ service platform which is based on its proprietary image recognition technology for its index, metadata registry and API connection to provide a wide variety of solutions involving image protection, ownership, identification, commerce, as well as business intelligence. PicScout is a member of PACA www.pacaoffice.org , CEPIC www.cepic.org , and BAPLA www.bapla.org.uk.
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