Humpty Dumpty in Dublin

June 8, 2010 by pmelcher.

At your tables, chairs set…ready ? 1, 2, 3.. Go . The freshly renamed  Centre of Photography ( Cepic) Congress  is about to start in Dublin, Ireland, in what is now an annual gathering of photographic convenience stores. Wide computer screens boringly pushing one lifeless image after another, hundreds of neatly arranged 4 seats tables ( no more, no less), a huge hall of sedated whispering, and every hour, on the hour, the delicately pre-arrange ballet of musical chairs. The only thing that changes, year after year, is the location. But does anyone even notice?

The CEPIC congress is  Einstein’s definition of insanity at its best : Doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results.  Punctuated by “talks” from self-proclaimed “experts”, “gurus” or “coaches”, whose only claimed to photo knowledge is to have been recently vomited from an highly paid executive position at one of the photo corporations, it repeats, year after year, the same pattern of stubborn  blindness. Year after year, its resembles more and more a meeting of eggs in a closet whose shells show signs of heavy cracking.

Why this assembly of  Commercial Stock photography suppliers continue to be so closed on itself, so violently persistent in its obsessions, so un-creative, so resilient to change, is becoming a boring mystery.

The grand old pompous  IPTC Consortium will hold it cyclical marathon session repeating over and over the same things, demanding full respect by obstination, claiming high and loud that is it a standard when it can’t even get two software companies to agree on  the same field name.  The Plus coalition will continue to speak highly of its endless and obsolete development, announcing more and more board room agreements that are never implemented. The same faces, the same voices will take the stage, (also behind tables), to fill the stuffy word space with vague and inconsequential statements, in front of a sparse and half asleep audience. Finally, night after night, all will reunite to wash the whole thing down with huge amount of free alcohol.

Sure, the CEPIC is relevant because it allows for agents and suppliers to meet at one place and one time, do their little business, and go back home, agreeably satisfied with a job well done. It gives everyone who attends a sense of safe continuity, the sense that, after all, everything will be alright.

Here is what to expect : More will be said about microstock (snooze), vendors will painfully try to sell software solutions to agencies that do not have any money to invest, arguments will be made about switching to licensing video (really ?), old timers will parade the halls looking for some self-gratifying recognition, lots and lots of notes will be taken on blocks, pens will be given away, and people will cross each other saying ” Sorry, I don’t have the time to talk, I have a meeting with…”, all day long. There will be more talks about how keywords will save you, search is key and of course, a lot of comparing size of collections.

Something new ? Of course, social media will be discuss ad vomitum : Twitter will save you, you GOTTA have a Facebook account,  viral this and viral that, Youtube, Flickr, Foursquare , Tumblr,   along with SEO and Google this and Google that. If you do not have or working on a Ipad/Iphone apps this year, you will be considered a loser. You GOTTA have an App.

People will also hear that you need to create a Niche. Because that is only way to survive : a niche. In other words, they will tell you to get out out of Getty’s way, because you can’t compete, and find a corner, where, hopefully they will not find you.  Problem is with this strategy is that a succesful niche is not a niche anymore, its a target. And, in industry where everyone, absolutely everyone is looking for  market share, becoming a target is not good news.

They will also tell you about Freemium, as they have freshly come out of reading the book, forgetting to tell you that the only companies that can afford Freemium strategies are those that are very well funded. Or to think “Long Tail” because it’s a cool concept, no knowing exactly what it means.

The Cepic congress is a big feel good gathering, like a giant therapeutic group hug , where everyone leaves satisfied that everything will be alright and to continue business as usual. It’s a soporific ego satisfier, a yearly lobotomy. Everyone pats each other cracked egg shell fully knowing that only accepted growth business model is to screw each other.

For CEPIC to one day be relevant again, it needs to go through a violent change. It needs to elect young Presidents ( 30 or younger), it needs to invite speakers from outside the industry, it needs to start looking 5 years ahead and not 10 years backwards. It needs to bring image buyers, photographers, creatives, thinkers. What it really needs is to come out of its highly reactionary protective bubble and destroys those crippling walls that they think are protecting them.

Posted in IPTC, keyword, license, Plus, commercial stock, technology, flickr, slideshow, getty, Royalty free, corbis, transaction, CEPIC, finance, Microstock | Print | 6 Comments »

What if ?

December 8, 2009 by pmelcher.

The other day we wrote a post about the Plus Coalition. Besides being bombarded by emails from someone who would like to remain anonymous and seeing a post on another blog defending it , there was no reaction to it. It wasn’t a big surprise. If you add those who have never heard about it to those who do not understand what it does and how it works, there is not much people left. Sure, there are the few board members, that include some crooks, who could be more vocal about it, but hey, what’s the point ? It is not going to become the standard for licensing anytime soon.

However, one can see the underlying scheme surfacing a little more. After making an exclusive deal with Picscout for image recognition without even asking for bidding from other image matching technologies, it is now encompassing, slowly, the Creative Common. After all, even free is a license, isn’t it ? And Plus will still make money, as it will still charge a fee to access images in its Registry. The question is why would someone bother to attach a license that they are offering for free, but that is another issue.

Now, the CEO of Creative Common is joining Pic scout as a consultant. The strangling triangle is now fully closed. PLUS/Picscout/CreativeCommon. Everywhere you look, you will be forced to deal with one of the three who will certainly refer one to the other. What will professional photography licensors will gain from this ? Not much besides being forced to pay to play by parasite companies.

On the same topic, I had the great surprise to see that in the video/space, Copyright infringement and rights was moving into the right direction. Probably unknown by many people, YouTube, who has been in the forefront of copyright issues, has come up with a very interesting solution. Call Audio ID or Video ID, this service allows for copyright owners to upload their content so that the automated matching system can compare any other upload to that library. The result ? If someone attempts to upload a video, or a audio linked to a video with our proper clearance, Youtube automatically blocks it. The fee ? Free. The result ? Youtube can now safely add advertising to videos without worrying about copyright issues and Copyright owners do not need to monitor Youtube all day long.

If Plus had been a little bit smarter and less greedy, they would have done the same. Instead of forcing users to do a search on a private registry to check for licenses, their database could continually scan the internet. If someone uploads an image to a site without the appropriate license, a red flag would come up. Since the Plus system does not currently handle location of usage, this is currently impossible to do. Furthermore, it would entail that Plus would not make any money, which is also an absolute no no for them. It is too bad, because with a similar system, a user who would try to upload an image for a site without the proper license would immediately and automatically prompted to contact the copyright owner. It would finally make stealing almost impossible and licensing much much easier.

The beauty of such a system is that it would NOT require a central database. Ones image database could easily work as a registry. The image would call back “home” and check for license information.

However, Plus like other registries, coming or already in place,   is just another business and another reason to suck up pennies from copyright holders. Sure, there are cost but then, why not create a subscription model instead ?

Needless to say, there is still a long way to make images more intelligent and simplify seller and buyers’ life. In the mean time we will have to cautiously navigate the treacherous waters of scammers and potion sellers.

More on Youtbe content ID here

Posted in license, copyright, Plus, technology, Search, IPTC, transaction, finance, web 2.0, law | Print | No Comments »

Plus or Minus ?

October 15, 2009 by pmelcher.

We hadn’t heard from the PLUS coalition for a while. This loose organization of visual professional who has been tediously trying to create a standard for licensing has suddenly burst out of its silence with two important announcements:

1) The ASMP has dug into its $1,3 Million  fund it had received last year ( we hadn’t not heard of that for a while too) to retrieve $150,000 as a generous gift to PLUS. This adds up to the $85,000 ASMP had already given to the coalition. This probably makes the ASMP the biggest provider of funds to PLUS by far (usually, organizations donate around $25,000). The question is why is the ASMP so interested in PLUS as opposed to fighting Google and its book scanning initiative ? PLUS has made no headway in the last few years and although everyone agrees it could become a useful tool, it has yet to be adopted and put in practice anywhere. It is also quite evident, although never clearly announced, that the PLUS business model is to create a licensing registry that would charge for its usage.  For pennies, indeed, but with billions of licenses happening online worldwide, it can quickly becomes a huge cash cow. Maybe ASMP sees this as a long term investment.

Also, with such a heavy donor, will PLUS feel the pressure to satisfy their needs (those of ASMP)  rather than those of publishers. After all, like in politics, those who have put more in usually see the benefits first.

2) PLUS has chosen Picscout as the exclusive provider of image recognition services to the PLUS Registry . That resembles the deal that PLUS had made with ImageSpan a while back. How does a coalition that is supposed to create a standard make exclusive arrangements with private companies ? It is a bit like the IPTC deciding that the only tool for reading metadata should be made by Adobe ? Image tracking is still in its infancy but yet PLUS has decided that Picscout is not only the best, but the only one? There are companies currently working on similar, if not better solutions that I really doubt PLUS has even approached. What is behind this deal that we are not told about ?

Picscout has recently announced its  Image IRC, which is an image registry who does not to want to say its real name, and has now combine forces with PLUS, another image registry in the making, for more fire power. Both will split the huge potential revenue for access to their overgrowing databases. What will happen soon is that image creators and copyright holders will soon be held captive by these organizations that will become the forced middle man for every licensing transaction.

With investors with mysterious agendas, strange relationships ( Creative Commons), Exclusive agreements ( ImageSpan and now Picscout), it is behaving more like a secret society that keeps its operations in the shade while putting little effort in the wide spread acceptances of its offerings. Not very social.

Posted in license, copyright, Plus, technology, IPTC, google, transaction, finance, photoshop, law | Print | No Comments »

Unapologetic Friday

May 29, 2009 by pmelcher.

Here are a few of the most revolting persistent aspect of the photo Industry:

- Blogs that get people fired

- Blogs or magazines written by people that have never ever worked in the Photo Industry yet consider themselves experts on all it’s aspects.

- Photo agencies that do not pay their photographers.

- Photo Agencies that license images under cover of a “Research or Service Fee”.  They simply take images, usually offered for free, and sell them with absolutely no right to do so.

- People that confuse easy to copy with free. It’s not because you can download an image easily that you can use it for free.

- People that use images without asking first.

- Geeks that launch microstock companies every minutes because they can.

- Hackers that spend their days breaking in photo agencies databases and stealing hundreds, if not thousands of images.

- Photographers that think they are photographers because they learned how to properly light a scene.

- Photographers that think they are good because they have been in business for a long time. Persistence is not a measure of quality.

- Photo agencies and photographers that price their images with their feet. The photography business is like driving a car, if you don’t know what you are doing, you are a danger for the rest of us. Please step out.

- Corporations that beleive they can control everything. They can’t.

- Corporations that hire non photo people and bring them in this industry. They wouldn’t survive a minute, and they don’t, if they were not working for these companies.

- Companies that have been loosing money for 20 years and are still in business. Why not use the money for useful purposes instead of feeding useless “corpocrates” ( that is an invented word for : Corporate and Bureaucrats).

- Photographer and Agencies that beleive in Say’s Law : production does not automatically create demand. Quantity is not the motor of success. The Photo agency business is not a freakin Lottery.

- Photo consultants that tell you they have the key to success and tell you to take better pictures and charge you for that. Duh !!

- Big Companies threatening photographers if they work for a competing agency.

- Photo Festivals that are just an excuse for someone to cash in some nice sponsorship money and have their hands kissed like a G~d for a week.

- Those endless photo competitions that are really just an excuse for a company to make money.

- Slides shows online that don’t work or are badly done.

- Websites from Big Publishing companies  that say they have no budget for photos.

- People that say ” Well, everyone else has accepted that price”. I really couldn’t care less how dumb other people can be. And, last thing I want to do is be associated with them.

- Photo Associations that rack up as many members as they can so they can get sponsorship money. Yet, they do absolutely nothing to help their members.

- Organizations that try to create standards and end up creating extremely useless and complicated monsters. They never use what they preach on a daily basis , so why would they care?

- Photo Galleries that exhibit the same photographers or photographs over and over again.

- People that beleive that Google will save them.

- Software that are not even compatible with each other.

- Iphone Apps. Enough already. Not everything needs to end up as an Iphone App. It’s just not that cool anymore.

- Geeks that think they know better.

- Exact Image Search websites that return no result for images, although you have seen the image a  hundred times. And they don’t even crawl photo agencies, which could be useful for people looking to license an image.

and finally, I have to stop somewhere, those photographers that pollute our visual space with their crap.

Posted in license, IPTC, idee, Plus, commercial stock, technology, keyword, google, editorial, corbis, finance, PACA, photoshop, slideshow, getty | Print | No Comments »

Reflecting in the pool

March 3, 2009 by pmelcher.

“Copyright owners tend to focus on the aspect they see of piracy, which is the lost revenue. They therefore think what drives users to do it is the desire to get something for free. But iTunes shows that people will pay for stuff online, if you make it easy. A significant component of piracy is simply that it offers a better user experience.” From Paul Graham_Why TV Lost_

Al thought written more for music and video, the above quote is true for photography. The next big step is figuring how to monetize the huge demand for visuals while avoiding piracy. No numbers officially exists on how many images are “stolen” either by a simple “copy paste”, “save as” or database hacking.  Agencies, as well as independent photographers will never admit publicly on how many of their images are floating around without being properly licensed.

A few solutions are slowly emerging but they offer more a reaction rather than an offer. Piscout, for example, will help you after the fact as well as Tineye.com. Imagespan, Gumgum, Piccapp, and others to come, offer an option, but not a solution. Most  copyrights owners are still hoping that metadata will save them, forgetting so conveniently that it can be so easily stripped away. Finally, organizations like the dying Plus Coalition are trying to  standardize archaic and complicated options in the ultimate hope to freeze in time antiquated models. None are making licensing easier.

Rather, by proliferating in multiple directions, these companies (who do not own any copyright) confuse and distract the marketplace even more. What we need is to encourage consumption, not add more leashes. And, as such, stop making our images so incredibly difficult and complicated to purchase. The microstock sector, taking cues from the traditional RF sector, has succesfully understood how important it is to empower the customer with a simple, smooth process.

That is the next evolution of our industry.

Posted in idee, copyright, Plus, technology, commercial stock, gumgum, license, IPTC, law, Royalty free, transaction, finance, keyword, prosumer, Microstock | Print | No Comments »

How many times ?

April 1, 2008 by pmelcher.

How many times will  members of this industry get together and talk about IPTC, keywording and other metadata. How many meetings, conferences, synopsis, “get togethers”, panels, parties, does it take ? Both the ASPP conference in Arizona and CEPIC in Malta have scheduled hours long conferences on this subject. Again. The one in CEPIC is 8 hours long !!!

It used to be that the IPTC was a small geeky association of nerds looking into how to standardize metadata in images. It has now become the most sought-after organization. More than the dying PLUS coalition.

The amusing part is that none of the attendants are keywording their own images. They have staff people to do that. Furthermore, none of the companies that offer this service are on the panels( JaincoTech, Keedup, OnAsia Digital, Etc) They would know better, wouldn’t they?  Instead, you have marketing managers or agencies owners sitting in stuffy rooms, vaguely writing notes while waiting for the suffering to end until they can finally get a free drink at the evening’s cocktail party.

At a time when the temple of controlled vocabulary  ( the Library of Congress) has decided to pull out from its antiquated method of keywording by putting 4,000 of its images into Flickr and ask for crowdsourcing wisdom, the photo agency world is wasting time and money into desperately trying to impose a standardized form of controlled vocabulary. Some probably spend more time and money on attending these panels than they do in a whole year of marketing.

The aim, apparently, is to define a series of code words that could be transported from one databank to another and yield the same results. Thousands of them. Same keywords. Wether they are related to the real world is irrelevant as the priority is to standardize and eventually give photo buyers a book on which word to use and how. And then what, have university offer a degree in photo researching, transforming photo buyers into bonified librarians? It is bad enough that some “photo editors” have no visual experience, it gives me the shivers to think what would become if this would happen.

There are few misconceptions here :

Language, unless dead, evolves all the time. Even dictionary publishers worldwide know  as they add and delete words every year.  Who uses “walkman” anymore ?

Keywording is not a marketing tool:  A bad or irrelevant  image well keyworded is still a bad image. It will not sell.

Controlled Vocabulary does not include local cultures. If it does, than it cannot be controlled anymore. It is arrogant, pedant and quite simply foolish to even believe that one controlled vocabulary can and will apply to the whole world.

A word is not a definition. It is only a description. It takes many words to skim the surface of what an image is. Thus keywording should be an accessory to search, not its main engine.

In the long term, keywording will die. Already, there are other emerging ways to search for images : visual, color, face recognition, similar, pattern recognition. In the text world, there is even semantic search, which allows you to search by meaning instead of exact match.

Google images, which everyone sees as the ultimate “find me tool” does not even index IPTC.

They say insanity is repeating the same thing over and over hoping for a different result. Seems to be that the photo industry is banging over and over on the same door and it will just not open.

The solutions ? Exactly what the user generated content agencies are doing. Let the keywords be offered by the source . They shoot, they keyword. And they keyword well because they are using an everyday vocabulary that the buyers are also using. A vocabulary that changes and evolves all the time. A vocabulary that is not “controlled”. Organized chaos.

Or follow the giants. Getty, which you never see at these repeated panels, as well as AP, Reuters, Corbis and others, have hired outside companies to do their keywords. Because it is not their chore business and do not feel it necessary to have a full time dedicated team of librarians. They seem to prefer selling images rather than cataloguing them.

It would be an interesting exercise to calculate how much time was wasted in “perfectly” keywording images that never sold in some of the medium or smaller agencies that seem to be obsessive about doing in house keywording .

Would it be more interesting for these congress, meetings, conference to have a panel about how to make great pictures that sale ?

Worst that could happen would be a few hours looking at great image.

Posted in keyword, Search, Plus, Zymmetrical, google, flickr, corbis, PACA, CEPIC, getty | Print | No Comments »

The Philosopher’s Stone

February 14, 2008 by pmelcher.

All other parameters set aside, it has always been the industry standard to price an image based on how many people would see it. And for a very good reason: If it was used in a lesser publication, in a small format, there was more chance that it it would be used again, by someone else, in another media. On the other hand, if it was used worldwide, in many media, it would fetch a “buy out” price.

Example of an advertising based image from GumGum and X17
We rely on circulation, printing run and languages to estimate the amount of potential views. Than came the internet. At first, the initial website where “tests” and minimum funding. As friendly as this industry could be, images where licensed for a flat fee, at an extremely generous price. Granted, the traffic was small and the promises big.

Agencies and photographers where eager to help and see this new market grow. $125 for a home page and $50/$75 for “inside” quickly became an editorial standard price as we all struggled to make it work. For commercial usage, price where, and are, in the thousand of dollar. Because they are licensed, they are even given a time frame, although the biggest majority of websites never pull out images but archive them. The images thus become licensed in perpetuity. Granted, harder to find and see, but still there.

Websites came and website went. New one appeared, funded by obscene amount of dollars, while other crashed and burned in a masquerade of quirky business plans. A lot didn’t even bother hiring real photo editors and relied on web designers or producer with no experience in photography, to license images. Prices remained the same.

For two main reasons : The promise of massive usage and the impossibility to seriously track usage. Websites claimed that even if they were paying a small fee for usage, they would be using a lot of images, thus making the volume compensate for the low payment. Appealing for photo agencies, not so for photographers. Some companies, like Wireimage, even created baffling subscription plan ($1000 a month  with eonline.com for all you can eat images) just to gain market shares and kick the competition out of their space . The gold mine turned into a mine of chalk.

Then came the RF and microstock guys. Their model was to not even bother negotiating anything. Here is our images, here is the price, do whatever you want with the image. Perfect for the internet space and its web designer who could get images at 3 :00 AM and not have to justify its usage. Image tracking companies like Picscout or Digimarc just made the management of RM on the internet even worse for users and pushed then even more into using RF images. But it didn’t help the editorial world. Long gone was the accepted model of the more an image is seen, the more its price should be higher, exactly like advertising.

Finally, two guys from the West coast of America, not from the industry, looked at this and said : “this is insane !!!”. In a medium that can finally track exactly how many people actually see an photo, images are still priced with a scheme right out of the medieval ages. Ads are being sold on how many hits they receive, why not images ?

They launched GumGum, which became live today, first offering X17 content and with many more to come. You set your price for how much an image is worth per views ( or thousand of views) and there you go. The bigger the site, the more they pay. If no one visits the site, the image is free. You can also put a cap and decide you want to license an image for 1 million views. Once you reach that target, the image ads an advertisement. Thus you can archive the image while the owner still gets revenue.

This is the most refreshing and revolutionary idea to hit this industry in decades. It is not going to be an easy sell to publishers who had a sweet deal up to now, but it is the future of licensing online. It is fair, simple and automated. easy to understand, to use and to apply. No need for Plus coalition complex interaction and implementation, no need to add any salespeople, no need for drop down head banging menus and complex calculation. No need to ever figure out the pricing. The usage figures out the pricing. Its the ease of RF applied to RM. The Philosopher’s Stone.

More on Gumgum here .

Posted in celebrity, copyright, magazine, Plus, gumgum, license, web 2.0, news, Royalty free, law, editorial, finance, Microstock | Print | No Comments »

Who does it belong to ?

December 17, 2007 by pmelcher.

A rather big parallel universe to the photo industry is the copyright industry. According to the Copyright Alliance, “The U.S. core copyright industries accounted for an estimated $819.06 billion or 6.56% of the U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) in 2005.” That, of course, includes music, graphic, video on top of photography. One has to assume that this number is about copyrighted and licensed products.

No wonder it has become a battlefield. On one side, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and its followers who preach that the internet and everything on it should be free and exchanged. Its a virtual world, after all, and all content should be distributed equally as to facilitate new creations. A global, unrestricted mash up. They are behind the Orphan Work bill and would probably like to see copyright laws disappear entirely, at least on the internet. Not a completely insane proposition if you believe that there is more to life than making money and that we could all be more creative if we did not have to worry about our budgets. I get to use your image and you get to use mine. We share. It would be great if photographers and agencies where also in the business of creating websites for consumers. But besides Getty and its upcoming Jamd.com, none are. Since photography is a raw material, like oil, and used in the process of creating something new, like a magazine, book, or ad campaign, it is hardly exchangeable. But, regardless, the free-for-all, “private property is evil”, lets trade community is here to stay.

On the other side, you have those who would like a piece of the pie. Take Creative Commons, for example. Currently a non for profit organization that has managed to raise a lot of money since its creation. By redefining how work of art can be used, albeit in a very simple way, it is positioning itself to become a major and inevitable player in this field. Right now, it is entirely free to use, making it extremely viral. But just think that even if they charged 1 cent ( euro, canadian, US or other, you decide) how much would that generate. If they grabbed just 1 % of the copyright industry, it would be $8 billion a year. And that is for the US only.

Besides the CC, the photo industry is familiar with the PLUS coalition, also in the same space. PLUS intends to charge a fee per license used. Recently, the very rich and powerful newspaper industry has also launch its own standard, the Open Access Data. Without going into long and boring details, it is obvious that whomever manages to create a worldwide standard will be sitting on a mega goldmine.

Where does that leave the photo industry that solely depends on copyright to defend its turf ? Well, depending on who wins the “copyright/license definition” battle the outcome will be completely different. But one can already envision a not too distant future where, one way or another, every image licensed on the web will have an additional fee that will have to be paid to one of these “Standard license owners”. Probably a “service fee”, it will resemble a tax on copyrighted material and proceeds will go in the pockets of those who have no other creative talent then bending the rules in their favor. The idea is simple : you create a standard and you make people pay to use it.

Most people would enjoy paying for a service that simplifies the licensing model and will not mind. If it makes RM licensing easier ( as easy as RF !!), it is sure to attract more buyers to the game. Considering the volume, the fee will probably be extremely low per transaction. Imagine, getting a fee for every image licensed on the web. Quite an income, isn’t it ?

Posted in Search, license, copyright, Plus, IPTC, prosumer, law, transaction, finance, Royalty free | Print | No Comments »