During this week's PhotoPlus Expo, Sausalito-based ImageSpan announced that its flagship product LicenseStream is now available in a business edition. This allows content owners to license and track their content through branded online stores.
As attendees were gathering in Miami for last week's conference of the Picture Archive Council of America, representatives of six trade organizations that unite more than 50,000 photographers and 800 American and European agencies met to discuss common goals.
The image-protection space gets another player with the launch of ImageRights, a new Web-based service designed to track image uses and recover fees for unauthorized reproductions.
Getty contributor Greg Ceo disclosed this bit of Getty Images news on his blog: the Seattle company will no longer produce wholly owned imagery. A Getty spokesperson clarified that the program is only shuttered for 2010.
This month, microstock segment leaders iStockphoto and Shutterstock announced legal guarantees for the user-generated content sold through their Web sites. Such moves answer customer demand and make doing business more difficult for traditional agencies and micro newcomers that have focused marketing efforts on the legal hygiene of their collections.
Shepard Fairey has, apparently, lied about which photograph he used as a reference for the HOPE poster.