~ A great idea is emerging from Europe and hopefully will cross the transatlantic pond. Instead of fighting the “orphan work” legislation, why don’t we try to work with it. One has to admit that it can be extremely hard to find the owner of an art work. Bad or no usage of metadata has generated a huge amount of lonely images, wandering aimlessly on the sidewalks of the information superhighway, with no hope of returning to its owners. On the other hand, professional, and not so professional image buyers have less and less time to seriously search for the pedigree of that one image they desperately need immediately.
The idea is quite simple : Use the image, credit it with a generic credit (in France they use D.R. It stands for Droits Reserve, rights reserved ), pay a licensing fee to a non for profit international center for photography.This organization could do many things:
– Find the owner of the image and pay the license fee (minus the cost of finding him/her)
– Fund free courses on metadata and IP technology.
– Fund research on image tracking technology- Fund exhibits, books, multimedia to allow the public to better understand photography and the work that is involved in creating it. And why it is important to pay a licensing fee.
Of course, there could be many other possibilities.
~ Getty/Scoopt.com: I have been asked many times what I thought about this. It seems that Getty is gearing themselves for the entry of Flickr and Google in the picture licensing business. By controlling UGC sites like Istock to Flickr and ViewImages.com, they can show their stockholders that they took preemptive measures. After all, let’s not forget, it is the job of the CEO of a public company to please and satisfy the stockholders first. Furthermore, it couldn’t have cost much to purchase Scoopt.com if the whole staff is made of 2 people already married somewhere in Scotland working out of theirkitchenoffice, as per this article on Stockphototalk.com~ No Sense entry: Crowdsourcing gone mad: Fell on this site the other day, Likebetter.com. The idea is quite simple. Two images are displayed next to each other, you click on the one you like better and see the total of others vote. I am assuming if your taste is the same as the majority, you win. And you do it again, and again, and again. Now, this might be a cool add on for a photo agency trying to get some ratings on their collection. But as a stand alone? I would love to see the business plan for this one. Do they plan to license their technology, which is quite frankly very basic ? Or do they expect to be the next Google ? ( web 1.0 had Netscape, web 2.0 has Google, Youtube being not far behind). “One day, we will have half of the world’s population clicking on images like crazy, dude”. No image credits, you can post a link to any images on another site, it’s another photography free for all. They should stick with their other venture : MOBMOV
