Florida-based GlamourKey is a stock business that uses green-screen technology to offer royalty-free fashion and glamour stock footage of models with keyed-out backgrounds. The company says it is the first in the world to offer this type of product.
Skyrocketing infringement rates and the seemingly inevitable arrival of an orphan-works legislation have scared the bejeezus out of content owners and inspired companies such as PicScout and The Copyright Registry to develop new products. The Associated Press is in both camps: the cooperative just announced that it is building an online registry of content to monitor its use, protect it from infringement and enable new business opportunities.
On Wednesday, the Stock Artists Alliance announced to its members that it intends to pursue a merger with the Association of Visual Artists: "It has been a tough, but essential, reality for us all to acknowledge that as a small association in an industry that's been hard hit by internal and external challenges, SAA needs to adapt in order to continue to serve you, our members, as effectively as possible," reads the letter signed by a six-member SAA board, lead by president Shannon Fagan, and past SAA presidents Leland Bobbé, David Sanger, Zave Smith and Roy Hsu.
Photo District News is beginning to prepare for this year's convention by touting the results of a recent survey that ranked PDN PhotoPlus Expo #1 in timely purchases following the trade show.
Karen Bernstein, a 30-year industry veteran and longtime international business development consultant to the New York-based Everett Collection, has passed away after a 3-year battle with a brain tumor.
ITN Source has won a competitive bid to supply 210 hours of content to Digital Images for Education. Scheduled to launch next summer, the initiative is financed by the JISC Collections, whose mission is to support U.K. education and research by delivering affordable, relevant and sustainable online content. ITN has also announced a similar deal in China and the launch of its seventh YouTube channel, with programming that targets book readers and provides marketing opportunities to publishers.
Last week, the British Association of Picture Libraries and Agencies alerted its members that it is supporting the National Portrait Gallery in its intent to pursue legal action against Wikipedia. Following the download of 3,000 high-resolution images from the its Web site and their subsequent appearance on Wikimedia Commons, the Gallery has attempted to discuss the issue with the online encyclopedia and, in the absence of a response, issued a lawyer's letter to a Wikipedia administrator. Wikipedia is saying the Gallery does not have a case, as the public has the right to access public-domain content.