Joichi Ito, the chief executive officer of Creative Commons, has joined the advisory board of PicScout. The company’s ImageExchange platform has also welcomed Dreamstime to the list of participating agencies.
ImageExchange makes it possible for potential image users to easily identify the creator and instantly connect with someone who is authorized to license rights to use the image. With the free ImageExchange browser add-on, anyone searching the Web for images sees an “information” () icon on images that are part of the PicScout program. Clicking on this icon displays contact information for a company that can legitimately license that image and a direct connection with the licensor to easily purchase the image for personal or commercial use.
If the image happens to be a Creative Commons image, the limits of use are specified along with the owner’s contact information. “Can Creative Commons Licenses Be Good for Image Sellers?” provides further background on the role of this system in the stock licensing industry.
Creative Commons’ Ito is considered to be among the most influential people on the Web. Ito has created numerous Internet companies including PSINet Japan, Digital Garage and Infoseek Japan; he was also an early stage investor in Twitter, Six Apart, Technorati, Flickr, SocialText, Dopplr, Last.fm, Rupture, Kongregate and others. According to PicScout, Ito will advise the company on issues such as defining standards and managing and optimizing metadata relative to image fingerprinting and tracking.
PicScout has also announced that the entire Dreamstime collection of microstock images can now be viewed and used by participants of the ImageExchange beta. Other agencies that have already made their images available through ImageExchange include rights-managed and royalty-free providers, such as Alfo, Blend Images, Glow, Life, Masterfile, Mauritius and UGC.
PicScout vice president of global marketing and business development Amy D. Love said that, with the introduction of the ImageExchange information icon, “excuses of unrecognized ownership (‘I didn’t know about rights.’) or (‘I didn’t know where to go to license.’) are no longer reasonable reasons for failing to properly use (or license rights to use) an image.”