Saturday, March 28, 2009
Will images accessed by C-Registry.us be searchable in StockPhotoFinder.com?
That same trade association email blast stated “[trade association name] is concerned that this is an attempt to seed StockPhotoFinder.com with images for its stock business.” (As a result, the rumor is now circulating that photographers will be unknowingly “seeding” the stock photo search engine with their images from The Copyright Registry.) In response to this trade association statement, we pose to ourselves the question: Will images accessed by C-Registry.us be searchable in StockPhotoFinder.com? (see reply in comments)
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The standard deal at StockPhotoFinder.com is to pay 80% of royalties to contributors on contract. Photographers could do a lot worse than an 80/20 split in their favor, and do.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately for photographers, there is absolutely no truth to these rumors. Images that are accessible at web sites via C-Registry.us are not going to be included in the stock photo search engine or its marketing sites. There are several reasons why this won’t happen.
First, photographers do not upload any images to C-Registry. There are no image files to license!
Photographers must sign a specific contract to have their images licensed and fulfilled via StockPhotoFinder.com, which licenses to advertising, publishing and other clients.
And lastly, StockPhotoFinder.com simply doesn’t want any more images that are outside of its normal contract terms. (Through its network of marketing sites that include over 100,000 web pages, StockPhotoFinder already enables search of over 4 Billion images.)
The Copyright Registry™ and The Stock Photo Search Engine™ are two separate brands for two separate purposes with two separate technologies.
That said, however, the reverse could be true. Images from StockPhotoFinder will likely be included in the registry. Since The Copyright Registry is designed to identify rightsholders of many, many images on the web, the registry will include records from 3rd party sources. These might include images (and music and video) found via the stock photo search engine and other search engines. It will also very likely include records from other registries and trade associations. C-Registry will include contact information from any and all individuals and organizations who want rightsholders to be found when a user is looking for them.
All this will supplement C-Registry’s in-house spidering process (described in detail in another post). The Copyright Registry is designed to identify the owners of a great many images and other intellectual property types on the Internet from lots of different sources. Only in this way can it live up to its service name and mission to help users find rightsholders, and vice-a-versa.
(Also worth noting … For each image file in the registry, the rightsholder can designate an ecommerce link to any stock agency of his or her choosing or handle the sales themselves and keep 100%. The rightsholder, which is often the photographer or creator, controls the information associated with each image or other intellectual property. They choose if, when and where it gets licensed, and whether it’s to be licensed by the rightsholder or their designated agent. Rightsholders are in control of their “copy rights” and copyrights.)