1 of the biggest thefts Online is that of images. Every day, there are 100s & 1000s of copyright infringements on the Internet. And guess what? It hurts artists. The photographers who spend hours, if not days, to click an image, find, much to their consternation & irritation, that the image has been used without permission by a Website.
As a lensman, protecting your work from such theft is hard. On the 1 hand, shutterbugs want to gain as much publicity as possible from the Internet’s presence of their labor of love. On the other hand, they don’t want to make their work to be too accessible, & miss out on paying customers. Watermarks are no answer for their destroy the aesthetic value of a picture, while metadata inside photos are easily removed.
Now, in such cases of violations, the cost of litigation can run into 1000s of dollars, many a times forcing photographers to let go. The costs of asserting & defending a copyright infringement claim have risen far out of proportion with the harm done. This is bad not only for creatives, but sole proprietors & small businesses as well.
There’s now a US-based startup that says it can help such “wronged” artists. PIXSY acts in a pro-active manner. When it encounters unlicensed imagery on the Web, it seeks a fair license fee on behalf the photographer “as an alternative to aggressive legal tactics”.
If it’s on the Web, PIXSY can import it, then be it from your Website, Flickr, 500px, Instagram & even Photoshelter. This startup alerts photographers to new publications of their work as soon as they’re discovered. It then determines a proper license fee & invoice commercial users of your work, but only with your permission. PIXSY automatically crawls the Web for your photos & displays the results to you. When you identify an image used without permission, it is upon the photographer to either let PIXSY to go ahead & contact that website to take action, or let it be. PIXSY does not take action without a photographer’s permission.
PIXSY believes in fair licensing & promotes good copyright practices. Team members of Pixsy contacts unauthorized photo users on behalf of artists to obtain fair payment for the use of a work. It only seeks compensation aligned with industry practice & local laws. PIXSY can be contracted to sniff out such images across borders.
As of now PIXSY’s beta service is free of charge. PIXSY receives a “success fee” for all revenue collected on behalf of the wronged photographer, though there’s no further explanation on it like percentage, etc.
Image Credit: PIXSY
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