Image rights holders and image users face a daunting challenge when it comes to managing licensed rights. Each year, untold thousands of rights managed, royalty free, and wholly owned images are licensed and used under vastly different terms and conditions, making the management and tracking of rights over time extremely difficult. Yet the use of an image outside of agreed terms can result in copyright infringement and significant legal damages.

There are numerous digital asset management systems on the market designed to capture and administer content and license detail. And many publishers have built enterprise-level systems that combine content, production and financial management modules. Large or small, personal or corporate, all image users face a common challenge  – the time and cost to effectively manage licenses and ensure copyright compliance often exceeds the cost of the license itself, and the failure to do so carries enormous liability.

To address this challenge, publishers, designers, ad agencies, museums, libraries, colleges,  stock agencies, photographers, illustrators, picture researchers, attorneys and image industry  leaders from over 70 countries came together to form the non-profit PLUS Coalition. Known worldwide simply as PLUS, the acronym stands for Picture Licensing Universal System. The single PLUS mission: “To simplify and communicate the communication and management of image rights.”

To accomplish this mission, PLUS first established international standards for communicating image rights. Next came development of the PLUS Registry – a global resource allowing image users to quickly identify rights holders and rights information for any image. Employing a combination of unique identifiers and image recognition, PLUS Registry users will be able to manage image rights within the Registry or from within any application connected to the Registry.

British trade association EPUK recently published an article  about the PLUS initiative, concluding that the PLUS Registry is:

 “…the largest evolutionary step for the imaging industry since the internet arrived…potentially the largest cooperative in history … radical and profound … If PLUS gets its way, it will be career and life changing for imaging professionals.  The result has become a grand design for a sustainable photographic ecology adapted to the internet age, evolved and refined over a decade of bridge-building and dialogue … PLUS is the only attempt and opportunity to systemically reinvent an environment that no longer works for anyone.”

Through PLUS, all communities engaged in creating, distributing, using and preserving images are for the first time working together on a global scale toward a shared goal.  To learn more about PLUS and to see and use the PLUS Registry as it develops, visit www.PLUSregistry.org

Roger Feldman is President of Feldman & Associations Inc., America’s largest independent content research and permissions organization.  A longtime member of the American Society of Picture Professionals, Roger has represented ASPP on the PLUS Board of Directors since 2004 and was elected to serve as Chairman of the PLUS board in 2011.

Join Roger and image recognition/search specialist, Leila Boujnane, founder and CEO of Idée Inc. on Wednesday, February 8, from 1:00 – 2:00 pm ET for License Tracking: Systems & Technologies.  Our panelists will take your questions on how to keep track of licenses and link unattributed images with their copyright owners.  Presented as part of The Future of Art & Commerce, a free webinar series jointly produced by the ASMP and CCC.  Click here to register and submit your questions for our panelists.

While ASMP does believe that proper titling of the images you register is a good long-term goal, until the eCO system is prepared to receive this information reliably we currently recommend that you do NOT follow the suggestion of adding titles in the “contents title field” of the registration application. For now, we recommend that you continue to follow ASMP Best Practices for Registering. Additionally, ASMP has an instructional podcast that gives you a step by step guide for registering “groups of unpublished images.” This seven-minute instructional podcast is available here.

This week, we are focusing on our contributors’ favorite bookmarks.  The places we go when we’re looking for information, inspiration, insights, training, time-saving tools and more; the bookmarks we find more valuable than the millions of other potential bookmarks that populate cyberspace.  And there are millions.

Now that the vast majority of the world wide web has been fully indexed, our society has discovered the downside to comprehensive search.  There are just too many choices.  How do you decide which ones are worth clicking on?  How do you know that something even better isn’t lurking on the 3,712th page of your favorite search engine’s returned results?

I’ll tell you how – just go to CameraCake.com

ASMP’s new social bookmarking  resource by and for professional photographers is live and open to all!  CameraCake lets you:

• post links to your favorite books, websites, blog posts, tutorials, articles – anything with a URL
• search resources that others have posted  by topic, category, type, tag, poster or reviewer
• like/dislike resources, add reviews and subscribe to resources, posters or categories
• easily identify the most popular and most recently posted resources in any search category

This is your opportunity to help build the largest and best searchable database of resources with value to professional photographers; a database that will help us all work faster and work smarter.

So, go to  www.CameraCake.com, create a user profile and submit your favorite resources.  Search, like/dislike and review resources others have posted.  Help your community, help yourself.  Join us at CameraCake.com – and bring a friend!

Judy Herrmann has spent the past 9 months building ASMP’s new social bookmarking site with invaluable help from Barry Schwartz and Luke Copping.  You’ll find her favorite bookmarks on CameraCake.com.

The Copyright Office, in response to concerns over the recent court decision invalidating the bulk Corbis copyright registration, is making some new recommendations for online registration of both published and unpublished work.

Read the full alert here. And, watch for further announcements from ASMP as we work towards a reasonable solution.

Click here to register.

From CCC site:

On March 22, Judge Chin issued his long awaited opinion in the Google Book Search settlement proceedings, rejecting the Amended Settlement Agreement (ASA) proposed by the Authors Guild, AAP and Google.

In his 48-page opinion, Judge Chin discussed the various objections before the court, including concerns regarding copyright, international law, antitrust, privacy and the class action/procedural aspects of the case – ultimately concluding that the ASA is not “fair, adequate and reasonable” as required for court approval of a settlement.

Judge Chin did, however, leave the door open for the parties to renegotiate and resubmit the settlement, urging them to consider adopting an “opt-in” rather than “opt-out” model which would ameliorate many of the concerns raised in the objections.

Through lively discussion, copyright expert Lois Wasoff and Copyright Clearance Center’s Christopher Kenneally will analyze this highly-anticipated decision, what it means for those affected by the proposed settlement and what is likely to happen next.

Copyright your images BEFORE they get stolen.  Don’t think it will happen?  Think again.  It happened to me last week.  While roaming the aisles of a trade show I came across my image displayed beautifully on a 6 foot wide backdrop….only problem was the image hadn’t been licensed to the business using it.  Ironically, the company who commissioned the original image had a booth across the convention hall.  Turns out both parties had used the same booth designer and he illicitly sold the image to the second company.   Add copyright into your workflow from the get-go.

Jenna Close, along with partner Jon Held, run P2 Photography.  They specialize in imagery for the alternative energy market.  You can find Jenna at www.p2photography.net.

It is my perspective that the role of copyright is to promote publication. Copyright is the engine that allows professionals to grant permission and collect money for the use of their work, that permission is a license. I see no reason for this to change. The fundamental change is how our images are published and what publishing really means in a world wide searchable channel like the Internet.

As commercial photographers our client relationships are primarily creating photographs on assignment or licensing existing images as stock to satisfy a need to sell an idea or to tell a story. Many of us routinely work for the same handful of clients for years. In this regard much of our business practice will not change. But with a new world of image buyers at their browsers, how do we engage them?

As professional photographers in the 21st century we need these things, universal image search with a licensing component, simple and easy to understand industry usage licenses with representative icons and a searchable images and license registry.

These are all possible now.

One model that is worth looking at very closely is Creative Commons. Built on top of Copyright law, this non-profit has built a series of iconic easy to read licenses that explain to the user what permissions they have when using a particular photograph. The image may be embedded with the license and with attribution which is a primary part of all the CC licenses. The simple language icon is built on top of a legal license that a lawyer could only love but one that is translatable in most languages around the globe. I wonder how many of my licenses are universally readable? Many photographers mistakenly assume that Creative Commons is just free pictures, which is just part of the story but not the only story, I suggest reading this.

If the standard copyright is ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, think of Creative Commons as SOME RIGHTS RESERVED.

For most professionals the CC licenses may not be part of your business plan, but some photographers have built their businesses around a hybrid model. This is something each photographer has to establish on their own, but what is interesting is the CC+ option, this model built around the Creative Commons Non-Commercial licenses, but with a component to license commercial rights. Yes, to make M-O-N-E-Y. Read about it here.

By the way, for you first timers, if users of Creative Commons Licenses fail to follow the license, they are infringing the copyright like any other infringer and all courses of legal remedies are available. Registration Counts and your photographs should be registered with the Copyright Office to protect your investment.

Creative Commons licenses are not for all photographers, but we can learn a number of important lessons,

•    Make licensing iconic and simple to understand in all languages.

•    Make attribution a basic requirement of all licenses.

•    Make it searchable and embeddable.

Richard Kelly is a photographer and educator living in Pittsburgh. As President of ASMP,  he is a progressive advocate for copyright and professionalism. Learn more about Richard here.

I hear lots of people say how CC makes “sharing” possible and promotes the “democratization” of creative culture. Really, it is the emperor’s new clothes of IP licensing–false, dangerous, and unneeded.

For centuries (there is specific references to licensing in docs dating as far back as 1474!), traditional licensing has permitted creators and users to work together to develop new innovations, new art, new technologies. As the text book we used in my Licensing class in law school puts it (Licensing Intellectual Property: Law and Application pp. 3-4, emphasis added):
[...] it enables creators of information, technology, and intellectual property to do the sharing and collaboration that lead to the creation of new information products, from the production of an epic motion picture to the development of complex software. In other words, licensing underlies technological and creative innovation. [...] licensing enables parties of all sizes and from all sectors to bring information products to market in a multitude of ways. In other words, licensing also underlies business model innovation.”

Think about all the innovations of the 20th century alone, these were all done under the traditional system of licensing. No creativity or innovation was suppressed. The internet was created and grew, very successfully, under traditional licensing!

Moreover, the ability to share (free) has always been inherent in the traditional licensing system. If someone took IP from a creator and the creator didn’t have a problem with it, the creator simply did not pursue the user. An implied license could be said to exist. No problem.

So, I urge all creative professionals not to get sucked into the rhetoric of “remixing” and “democratization of culture” etc. that is promulgated by CC. Did you know that if you license a work using CC, you can never revoke that license later? And that each user under that license can sublicense your work (same terms)? It’s like a virus-license! You lose all control, forever.

You have all the tools you need under the traditional licensing system. You can give and share on your own terms, but you can protect and monetize efficiently as well. The language of the CC is seductive and sounds ever so good, especially to the creative mind that loves collaboration and working with others, but its a siren’s call to your professional doom.

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Leslie Burns is a creative/marketing consultant and not a lawyer (yet). She is taking the summer off from law school to work on a 2nd ed. of her photo biz book. Follow her at burnsautoparts.com/blog, facebook.com/burnsautoparts, and twitter.com/LeslieBAP.

Ask most photographers about Creative Commons and they will likely respond that it is just a tool for people to use images without having to pay for them. At first glance this may seem true. Creative Commons allows people to use photographs and other intellectual property created by others in several broad categories of use. These are broad licenses where creators receive no compensation. This is the part that most photographers see as a devaluation of copyright or “giving images away for free”.

But is it? Creative Commons does offer licenses. They may not be the kind of licenses we want to grant for our work, but they are licenses none the less. What do they do? The facilitate licensing. They provide a mechanism for a copyright owner and an end user to negotiate specific uses and operate with respect for current copyright laws. In essence, the end user obtains a proper license that the copyright owner grants for the use of their work. As long as the user abides by the limitations granted in the Creative Commons license, they may use the image without fear of infringing the copyright owner’s copyrights.

While the current range of licenses available through Creative Commons does not address the licensing needs of most transactions between professional photographers and their clients, it does offer a model to build on. The strength of the model is that it is fast, easy, available and widely recognized. The traditional process of obtaining licenses from photographers tends to be slow, complicated and without standards. However,  the PLUS Coalition has done tremendous work in trying to bring standardization to this process.

Technology has changed the expectations of how users expect to obtain content. Creative Commons may not meet our commercial needs and is geared to specific markets. However it is an important first step in solving the issues on how users of content can easily and quickly obtain legal rights to utilize that content.

Can Creative Commons model be a guide for us to build or utilize new infrastructure to license our work?

Once in a while I will meet a marketing person who demands the right to allow property owners, contractors and other entities unrestricted use of our images without additional fees. Some have expressed their right to resell photographer’s images to recover their firm’s cost from an assignment or worse, make a profit from our intellectual property, the images we create.

They may have been influenced in the past by photographers who allow unlimited and unrestricted usage to any third party firms such as contractors, vendors or manufacturers who want them as part of a package and this is a dangerous trend.

There are some photographers who have been shooting for years and didn’t care about the long-term issues or the loss of potential revenue, not to mention the potential damage they are causing to our industry. These photographers are giving away potential income but worse, they have created a culture or a norm by allowing their clients to walk all over them.

If you have not already done so, it would be in your best interest to add the NON TRANSFERABLE clause to third party requestors into your contracts. That offers further protection to your intellectual property.  It also will give you a stronger potential for future income. You will need to monitor and enforce that issue but clients will pay attention and you have the potential for making a better profit from your work.

Invest some time exploring the www.asmp.org web site. Start with the link to commerce and publications on business practices. Browsing through the legal resources section can empower you to move your career forward with a better understanding of how to create stronger terms and conditions, licensing, copyright registration and beyond.

Your estimate, contract and your terms and conditions need to be firm and well defined. Illustrate what the client is receiving. You also need to illustrate the limits of their license, the terms or period of use again. The information that you can down load from that site will surprise you and is well worth the time invested.

The key to making a better living in our profession is controlling the licensing of our images and protecting our future as ASMP photographers.” Empower yourself.