Associations
Registration is now open for the 18th Annual
PACA Conference in New York City October 20-23, 2013. PACA will be teaming up with
Visual Connections to bring a 3-day event, which will feature the PACA Conference on days 1 and 2 and Visual Connections on day 3.
The biggest problem for the
CIR will be finding a way to let all the potential image users know it exists. It may be fairly easy to make the big publishing organizations aware of the CIR. They have been crying for a way to quickly determine if an image needs to be licensed and where to go to license it. But there is a long tail of small design firms and web developers that in the aggregate use a lot more images than these big users. It will be very difficult to reach all these small occasional users and make them aware of the CIR and its benefits.
Motivated by the European Union’s challenge to develop a technological system that would make it easier for European citizens to gain access to cultural resources CEPIC has developed the CEPIC Image Registry (CIR) that will allows simultaneous visual or text search across thousands of image databases. Read more about how will work and how it may change the image licensing business.
At the CEPIC Congress on June 11th the American Society of Media Photographers (ASMP) will sponsor the second annual "Photocentric Day," a day of inspiration and learning with the theme:
How can the professional generate revenues in the digital world?
At the CEPIC Congress in Barcelona on Wednesday June 12th there will be a discussion on a new initiative that could generate significant new revenue for image creators whose images are “crowd sourced” and posted without authorization to various domains on the Internet. This story examines the “Winston Project,” a system for collecting revenue for “Passive Image Use.” when a user uploads an image created by someone else to a “crowd sourced” domain, or when a user clicks on an image or shares it within the domain.
The American Photographic Artists (APA) association has joined 15 plaintiffs in a copyright infringement lawsuit against Google that alleges the “Google Book Search” program violates the copyrights of numerous photographers and other visual artists.
In recent discussions with agents operating in Europe it seems that it has become impossible to hold the line on pricing. They say there is always a competitor willing to undercut any rate.
The
CEPIC Congress in Barcelona June 10 – 14, 2013 will attract stock agents from around the world. Falling prices and the impact they are having on stock agencies and professional photographers will be one of the key issues discussed.??I posed a series of questions to a few industry leaders that will be in attendance. Earlier Alfonso Gutierrez, CEO of age fotostock shared his
observations and opinions. In this story I will examine responses from a few others.
The CEPIC Congress in Barcelona June 10 – 14, 2013 attracts stock agents from around the world. Pricing will be one of the key issues discussed – specifically falling prices and the impact they are having on stock agencies and professional photographers. I posed a series of questions to a few industry leaders. This story is a response from Alfonso Gutierrez, CEO of
age fotostock.
PhotoShelter and ASMP have partnered to produce and distribute a
new guide that discusses photographer’s rights under the U.S. copyright law and explains what they must do to protect their work.
Editorial Photographers has announced its 2013 EP Edu Student Photography Grants program that will provide $1,000 cash grants and another $1,000 worth of gear and business tools to six deserving photography students. Entries must be submitted before March 17, 2013. Entrants must be enrolled full-time during 2012-13 in an accredited college in the U.S. or Canada. Full details are here:
http://www.epedu.org.
The leading trade associations representing professional photographers have sent the following letter to Kevin Systrom, CEO of Instagram protesting Instagram’s new “terms of use.”
One of the programs at the recent PACA International Conference asked five industry visionaries to explore emerging trends and predict what the stock photo business will be like in 2022. There was general agreement that the current business model of licensing based on usage is
broken and that in a few years (probably a lot less than 10) it will be necessary to develop a completely different approach to licensing.
Stock photo professionals in the UK and across Europe are deeply concerned about the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Bill that is working its way through Parliament. As currently proposed it represent a serious threat to the ability of rightsholders to generate income from copyrighted works.
At the PACA International Conference in Chicago in October the keynote
speakers was Ken Carson, EVP and General Counsel of Cengage Learning. He
outlined many of the challenges educational publishers face today and
provided insights as to where content licensing for educational use is
headed.
The buyer’s panel at the recent Picture Agency Council of America (PACA) conference in Chicago offered a number of ideas for ways individual sellers and stock photo distributors might adjust their search, delivery and pricing procedures to improve the chances of their images being chosen and used.
American Photographic Artists (
APA) has announced that Editorial Photographers (
EP), a highly regarded association aimed at improving profitability of editorial photography, has agreed to a merger that will benefit professional photographers around the world. The merger is scheduled to be completed by the end of the year. This merger will increase the size of APA to approximately 3,200 members.
At the Picture Archive Council of America (PACA) international conference in Chicago over the weekend PACA and CCC (Copyright Clearance Center) offered a proposal for collecting revenue for the unlicensed use of images on social media sites and distributing a share of that revenue to the creators whose images were used
Last year a positive partnership between content creators and internet service providers (ISPs) was created to better educate internet users on legal options for receiving entertainment content online and to inform consumers who repeatedly engage in infringement that their actions are inappropriate. Now they are ready to launch the Copyright Alert System.
The Association of American Publishers (AAP) and Google have announced a settlement agreement that will provide the Google Library Project with access to books and journals that are still protected by copyright. Now, Google may digitize new books as well as make the contents of books already scanned available online.
For more than 30 years “Collecting Societies” in many countries have had systems to compensate photographers when their images in books and periodicals are photocopied. U.S. photographers are not so fortunate.
Last weeks
announcement that PACA, ASMP and CCC are considering some type of arrangement that would compensate image creators for the unauthorized web usage of their images on sites like Pinterest, Facebook, YouTube, etc. needs careful examination by all photographers and distributors before anything is formalized.
The Picture Archive Council of America (
PACA), American Society of Media Photographers (
ASMP) and the Copyright Clearance Center (
CCC) are jointly exploring the development of a new, global, collective licensing model for unlicensed web usages. PACA expects this model to have a transformative impact on the industry for all licensors of visual media.
The American Society of Media Photographers (
ASMP) has created a free Model/Property Release app for iOS (iPhone and iPad) that makes it easy for photographers to enter their own and the models information. The forms require that a photo of the model be attached to the release before it can be completed. Once the form is filled out the model, the photographer and a witness can each sign the form using their finger or a pen in the same manner as electronic credit card purchases are normally signed. Then, a PDF of the completed release can be emailed to the photographer and the model.
In the following article, first posted on
Visual Connections, Michael Masterson, President of
American Society of Picture Professionals (ASPP), and a natural networker offers three tips for the imaging professional on the importance of networking, and how to go about it.