Sausalito-based ImageSpan has announced that the services of Toronto company BrandProtect are now part of online content licensing platform LicenseStream.
As a whole, BrandProtect sounds like a combination of a crisis-focused public relations firm and trademark watchdog: in its own words, the company helps detect, uncover and mitigate brand and trademark infringement issues, phishing attacks, Web traffic diversions, Web site integrity issues and defamatory discussions. LicenseStream uses BrandProtect’s LinkWalker, which identifies where brands, company names, images, audio, video and trademarks appear online.
LinkWalker visits roughly 1 billion pages monthly as part of its monitoring activities. The data it gathers will help LicenseStream users track and respond to unauthorized uses of proprietary content such as images.
The LinkWalker database stores information on more than 70 billion links associated with more than 350 million domains and 12 billion Web pages. New links are added daily. On average, LinkWalker finds more than 300 million images per month in its searches.
Prior to the deal with BrandProtect, LicenseStream offered its users Digimarc’s watermark-based Digimarc for Images. BrandProtect extends a similar tracking capability to other types of media content using both text and image-matching search and digital fingerprinting.
LicenseStream’s content tracking service will now use information from both Digimarc and LinkWalker to provide reports to LicenseStream users. Users can then chose one of multiple actions offered by the LicenseStream platform to respond to unauthorized uses—for instance, initiating collections and requesting attribution or removal. BrandProtect also adds another valuable service: through its relationship with 4,000 internet service providers around the world, it can inhibit further use of infringing content.