The current status of submitted media, image theft, and ...

? Rudy Umans 2012

The current status of submitted media, image theft, and the internet

By Aurora Business Consultants/Rudy Umans October 2012

A Report on copyright infringement and image theft in the current internet based market place.

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? Rudy Umans 2012

Table of Content.

Definitions............................................................

3

Introduction..........................................................

4

Summary..............................................................

5

Analysis...............................................................

6

Agents................................................... 6

Retail Stores........................................... 9

Image Sharing Sites................................

10

Social Network Sites...............................

11

Involuntary Outlets.................................

12

Types of Perpetrators..............................

12

Types of Offenses...................................

13

Current Prevention..................................

13

Current Corrections................................. 15

Suggestions.......................................................... 16

Acknowledgments.................................................. 19

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? Rudy Umans 2012

The current status of submitted media, image theft, and the internet

By Aurora Business Consultants/Rudy Umans

Definitions

Voluntary Outlets (Outlets):

Agents Agents are in general commercial web based companies who represent a contributor. Agents maintain an image bank and engage in marketing activities in behalf of the Contributors in exchange for a percentage of the sales. Contributors do not have the opportunity to build a custom website or web presence. Instead, contributors have a portfolio. Sometimes links are provided (as an option) between social network sites and the contributor's portfolio and portfolio activities. There is a distinction between Royalty Free (RF) and Rights Managed (RM) agencies.

Retail Stores Retail Stores are commercial web based companies that offer a variety of products that could be in part designed by the seller. These products are sometimes also customizable by the buyer. Some Retail Stores specialize in wall art prints with or without frames. The websites that offer this type of service are generally referred to as Print on Demand (POD) sites. Contributors have usually the option to customize their web presence to some extent. Sometimes links are provided (as an option) between social network sites and the contributor's web presence and store activities.

Image Sharing Sites Image Sharing sites are generally non commercial sites where contributors can upload their images to share with either a selected group of people or with the general public. Although, these sites are not intended to sell images, it does happen from time to time. Contacts and price negotiations are in those cases done directly between the buyer and the contributor. In addition, there is at least one known Agent with a separate collection build around a sharing site.

Social Network Sites Social Network Sites are generally non commercial sites where contributors can share information about just about everything within either a selected group of people or with all other contributors. Besides the typical social networking, these sites are also used to share

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? Rudy Umans 2012

images within a selected group of people or with all other contributors. In most cases users, both active contributors/participants and viewers need to sign up in order to get access to the content. Signing up is a simple free of charge procedure.

Contributors Contributors are everyone who voluntary uploads images to voluntary outlets.

Work For the sake of simplicity, work is defined as all submitted materials in all media and file formats, such as JPEG, JPS, EPS, Tiff, etc. In general these are Photographic Images, Footage, or Graphic Designs.

Reseller A reseller is an independent company that has an agreement of some sort with another company to resell their product offerings. Resellers are fairly common with mainly RF Agencies and some Retail Stores.

US based The headquarters of these entities are not necessarily domiciled in the US, but these are entities with a legal presence in the USA, conduct business in the US, and are required to comply with all US laws and Internal Revenue Service's Rules and Regulations.

Other Outlets

Involuntary outlets

Involuntary outlets are outlets that contain images from contributors without the contributor's knowledge or control. Examples are public domain and some web search results.

A. Introduction

1. This report is created by Rudy Umans and Aurora Business Consults as a direct result of discussions among a small group of contributors about the growing perception of unauthorized use of submitted work. Pertaining to the issues discussed in this report, we mainly looked at US based outlets. It was not possible to look at every single aspect of this very complex business, but we did look at the main aspects of this business and entities involved. Even though we are contributors ourselves, we tried to be as objective as we possibly could. For that reason, we do not mention any names of individuals or companies. We wrote this report with the assumption that the issues as discussed are worldwide, affect everybody involved, and do not have one particular origin.

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? Rudy Umans 2012

2. We looked at Agencies, Retail Stores, Image Sharing Sites, and Social Network Sites. It would have gone beyond the scope of this report to look at individual sites and blog providers as well.

B. Summary

In short, the situation is very complex and seems to get even more complex every day. All the links in the chain have weak points. The contributors, the outlets and the technical aspects leave all many things to desire. If the problem of image theft ever can be solved, it can only be done if all three links in the chain can find a way to work together.

This report was created as a direct result of complaints on numerous message boards and other sources about the enormous amount of image theft and copyright infringement of media that was submitted to the internet. The focus of this report is on just that and not so much on any other aspect of the industry.

Even though, it is practically inevitable that submitted media will be stolen or misused on the internet sooner or later in one form or another, this report tries to find out if there is a way to at least improve the situation.

The current situation is that there is room for improvement with all parties involved. It is easy to point a finger, but that is not the purpose of this report. For that reason we do not mention names and tried to keep identities hidden. Pointing fingers will not solve anything.

It is not feasible, or even possible, to eliminate image theft by the occasional blogger or message board poster. However, it must be possible to take appropriate measurements against the professional and semi-professional thief and copyright infringer. It seems helpful in this quest to keep track of these people one way or the other by the agents and the retail stores. Without their help, every attempt will work only as a band-aid and does not solve anything long term.

Contributors need to get smarter, outlets need to get clearer in their communications to the contributors, and current, and future, technology needs to be more utilized whenever possible.

Contributors need to educate themselves about the outlets they submit to. Reading and understanding Contributor's agreements and learning about the offerings of the Outlet, contributors can prevent unexpected "surprises"

Contributor's Agreements and Terms of Use or Service need to be written in an easy to understand language and need to be easy to find on the web sites.

This report is divided in three main sections: Definitions, Analysis, and Recommendations.

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