As a result of technological advancements, and the new image search techniques on the horizon, we are about to enter another paradigm shift in the way stock images are licensed.
Consider some changes that are occurring.
1 – Frequently major publishers find images they want to use that have no identification as to where they should go to license usage. They are pushing for systems that will make it easy to locate someone who can license rights to such images, or at least limit their legal liability if they go ahead and use the image anyway.
2 – The European Union is pushing for some type of a system that will enable potential image users to determine if an image is copyrighted and needs to be licensed, or if it is “orphaned” and available for free use.
3 – In the UK the
Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act has made it possible for new copyright regulations to be written that will create a Copyright Hub where users will be able to search for images that need to be licensed and easily make contact with someone who can license rights to their use.
4 – All these systems look toward providing some type of limited protection for users who have done a “diligent search,” and determined that an image is an “orphan,” or that it is free to use for other reasons.
5 – The
CEPIC Image Registry (CIR) has demonstrated a pilot project that will enable users to go to one online location and instantly, using image fingerprinting technology, search across hundreds of image database from around the world to identify the owner and licensors of a specific image.
6 – The UK
Copyright Hub will do basically the same thing as the CEPIC Image Registry and either connect directly to the CEPIC Image Registry, or connect directly to most of the databases listed on the CIR.
7 – Undoubtedly, a similar hub will be developed in the United States that will link to image databases around the world. So far there is no specific proposal.
8 – Today, most professionally produced images are available for licensing through a multitude of distributors around the world. The CIR, the Copyright Hub and other central search facilities of professionally produced images will make it possible for customers to easily compare prices and license use of images at the lowest possible price.
Some things to think about
As usage of these hubs becomes common, working with lots of distributors around the world may in some senses become a liability rather than an advantage. Customers will be able to easily identify the cheapest source and purchase the images they want to use at the lowest possible price.
On the other hand keyword searches for commonly used subject matter will not be as effective on a hub as on a smaller database with a limited number of returns. The hubs are expected to have over 150 million images in the near term (probably before public launch) and likely hundreds of millions of images in the not too distant future. Hubs will be great for finding information about a specific image when the customer has a copy of that image. They may not be of much use when the customer needs to do a keyword search. In most cases there will be such a huge number of returns that the customer will only have time to review a fraction of them. In such cases customers may prefer to go to smaller edited collections rather than look at the whole universe of images.
It is believed that none of the hubs will license images directly, but will instead direct customers to organizations that license images on behalf of individual creators.
For some creators who would like to make their images searchable through a hub it may be advisable to only make them available through a single database where the creator can control the licensing fee. The difficulty will be that distributors will want to make all the images they represent for keyword search available through the hub. They will not want to allow individual creators to opt out of hub searches, and still have the images available for keyword searches.
It is unclear whether individual creators that normally deal directly with customers will be able to have their image collections searched directly through a hub. It seems that the creator would first have to searchable image database with a text search engine. They would also need to have an image search engine that would contain “fingerprints” of every image in their collection and be able to compare the fingerprint delivered from the hub with the fingerprints of their images. Finally, they would have to conform with the communication protocol of the hub they are working with. Meeting all these requirements may be impractical for most individual contributors.
Some photographers are taking the position that they don’t want their images to be part of any of the databases connected to a hub because then, if someone were to use their image, they might not be able to pursue unauthorized users for infringement. The only people who will be able to license images found through a hub will be the database operator where the photographer placed his/her images, or distributors that work directly with that database operator. The hub will not license usages. If the image has not been licensed the copyright holder can purse legal action. On the other hand, the laws may be structured so that if an image cannot be found by a “diligent search” of a hub, then the user may have some limited protection in terms of liability. In this case the photographer’s work would be at greater risk if it could not be found on the hub than if it were available there.
One concern is that when a search request is sent out from the hub the database that responds first will be the one whose images are shown first. This will probably mean that all the images from the companies with the greatest bandwidth or the fastest internet hookup will always be shown first. This could put small distributors at an extreme disadvantage. Solutions will need to be devised that give smaller distributors a fairer chance to have their images seen.
While the United States requires registration of copyrighted works with the U.S. Copyright Office in order to pursue legal infringement action in federal court, there is no way to search those registrations for a specific image if all the user has is a digital copy of the image in question. Given the way registration information is stored it is virtually impossible to use image search technology to search the U.S. copyright database. Thus, the Copyright Office database is useless as a tool for locating the owner of an image prior to infringement. There is some indication that the U.S. laws might eventually be changed to make existence of an image in a database that could be searched through a hub sufficient evidence that it belongs to the copyright owner. However, this would require changes in the U.S copyright law. Given the current dysfunction of the U.S. Congress it seems unlikely that anything will happen in the near term. Protection in the U.S. from an image being declared an “orphan” will probably lag action in Europe by a significant amount of time.
Conclusion
Delaying or ignoring this new trend in image marketing is not a viable option. It will move forward whether individual creators like it or not. The only option is to figure out how to adapt to this new reality in a way that will allow the creator to continue to earn a living.