The Obama administration, through the offices of the U.S. Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator Victoria Espinel, has recently requested input from interested parties as to how piracy and copyright infringement is affecting the economy. The deadline for filing was March 24. Virtually all photographer trade associations and many other interested parties submitted reports and made recommendations for change.
A key issue is the degree of unauthorized use. Getty Images says it identifies approximately 42,000 unauthorized uses a year; Corbis says its tally is at about 70,000. PicScout, whose Image Tracker line of business searches the Web for unauthorized photo use, says that in 2009, more than 80% of the images they located on the Web on commercial sites were either used without a license or beyond its terms. In addition, there were many unauthorized print uses, but for the most part, there is no good way to track that volume at this time.
PicScout has “fingerprinted” 5 million unique creative (non-editorial) rights-managed images supplied by stock agencies and photographers. The Image Tracker software compares this collection to about 20 million images per day found on commercial Web sites. PicScout is not currently searching newspaper sites, dot-org or blog sites, since it is generally considered that it would be hard to collect from such users. At 20 million a day, that works out to over 6 billion images a year that are compared to the 5 million images available for licensing.
In 2007, PicScout and the Stock Artists Alliance conducted a study to determine the degree of unauthorized image use. The SAA put together a collection of 20,000 images that had never been licensed for Web use. During a four-month test, 388 uses were found, all of them unauthorized. If we interpolate this number to cover a full year, and the 5 million images in the collection today, that would give us an average of about 291,000 uses of rights-managed images each year.
It should also be recognized that PicScout is constantly increasing the number of Web sites it searches and the images it reviews each day. Currently, the company scans sites in more than 14 countries, while the SAA test only included sites in the U.S., U.K. and Germany. Consequently, today PicScout is probably finding many more instances of infringement than in 2007.
It is interesting to compare this figure with the annual number of paid rights-managed uses. An estimated 1.5 million rights-managed images are legally licensed annually worldwide. Adding 300,000 illegal uses to this number would mean that approximately 14% of all rights-managed images used in print and online are not legally licensed.
The average rights-managed license fee for Web use is above $200. Thus, for 240,000 images, rights-managed sellers have been deprived of in excess of $48 million. If these infringements were in the U.S., and if the image is registered with the copyright office, there is the possibility of recovering even more in damages. Recently, a Georgia court awarded Masterfile $600,000 for the unauthorized use of just 20 images.
Finally, PicScout does not monitor many rights-managed images that are currently available for licensing. It seems likely that many of them are also being used without permission.