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.
The advertising model for funding the costs of newspaper and magazine content creation and delivery seems to have outlived its usefulness. Is there an alternative to meeting the needs of advertisers, content creators and consumers?
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.
The European Union's telecommunications chief Viviane Reding recently said that it is not piracy that is destroying the recording industry's business model, but a failed business model that is leading to piracy. This sentiment applies as much to the imaging industry as the recording industry, and it should be a wake-up call to business owners.
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.
Recently, a very talented and successful photographer who produces both rights-managed and traditional royalty-free images was bemoaning the sorry state of the stock photo industry. He said: "We need a little respect [for our work]."