Copyright, Beyond the Basics for Media Companies, Content Archives and Creative Professionals

Our first webinar of 2011, this is a follow up to one of our most popular webinars last year Copyright 101.  Hosted by LicenseStream and our friends at Digimarc we’ve invited guest presenter Jonthan Bailey of Plagiarism Today to dive a little deeper on some popular copyright themes and questions.

When: Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Time:  10:00AM PST / 1:00PM EST

Presenters: Jonathan Bailey, Plagiarism Today, Mary Kuch-Nagle, Licensing Executive, Digimarc and Candice Murray, VP Business Development, LicenseStream

Register Now: http://bit.ly/hjg0nF

During this free, one-hour informational webinar we’ll delve into the following:

• An overview of the basics
• Works by multiple authors specifically how this affects copyright
• Basics of Fair Use
• Differences between copyright licensing and transferring
• And much more!
  

We hope you can join us, save your spot and register now: http://bit.ly/hjg0nF

The ImageSpan team just returned from Museums and the Web, an annual conference that drew 600 museum professionals to Denver to explore “the social, cultural, design, technological, economic, and organizational issues of culture, science and heritage on-line,” according to the event’s online brochure.

Museum professionals view the Web as a potential treasure trove of opportunities, which may help explain why attendance rose about a third for this year’s Museums and the Web event.

The question is: how to best leverage the Web? Presenters from around the world strove to answer that question by sharing ways to engage audiences online. For example, one presentation covered how best to present large collections online so that the public can easily find what interests them, while another offered ways to complement, enhance and extend on-site learning with on-line learning.

The biggest trend to emerge from this year’s event was “a focus on sharing data and putting data outside one’s own website into spaces controlled by others,” said David Bearman, a partner in Archives & Museum Informatics and a key organizer of the event.

For many long-time museum professionals, releasing content to the “wild” of the Internet is a scary and daunting prospect. However, most of those in the museum community understand the educational, cultural and even monetary benefits of making their content available online. A lot of museum professionals simply want to make their content available for browsing by art lovers, or for educational purposes. Others want to know who is using their content and want attribution for it online, but do not want to charge for its use.

This latter group expressed interest in the combination of LicenseStream Tracker with Digimarc for Images, which lets photography agencies, media companies, museums and archives add an imperceptible digital watermark to communicate copyright ownership and information on how to contact the owner wherever the image is found online. The LicenseStream Content Tracker then crawls the Web looking for uniquely watermarked images, providing regular reporting on where a content owner’s images are found so they can take appropriate action.

Yet other museum professionals are just beginning to realize that there may be new markets for their content where it would be fine to charge a usage fee – for example, for advertising or another commercial purpose such as store design. Many museum professionals had their eyes opened to this notion at Museums and the Web, where the Missouri History Museum  demonstrated how ImageSpan’s LicenseStream  empowered it quickly and efficiently to start discovering new markets and sell hundreds of images.

As a result, a comment we heard often at the event was: “I know that we are sitting on a gold mine, but it’s just such a huge undertaking.” Museum professionals recognize that there is value in their content, but do not believe they can begin licensing it until they have a content management system in place and until they digitize, tag or keyword ALL of their content to make it easy to find, use and license.  However, the Missouri History Museum’s experience with LicenseStream demonstrated that this is not the case. The museum has more than 600,000 images, including many that are not digitized, and it is still implementing a content management system. However, already it has begun licensing its images with LicenseStream.

How? While LicenseStream is not a content management system (CMS), it can host content to enable licensing, royalty processing, multiple-party fee disbursement, etc. In fact, LicenseStream can “plug in” to any existing architecture and/or CMS to generate revenues that will help a museum justify the larger content management initiative.

Another huge trend at this event was the interest in mobile applications. This spike in interest reflects the broader market’s interest in mobile applications, as highlighted in a recent announcement by the research firm Gartner said investments in mobile applications and technologies will increase through 2011 as organizations emerge from the recession and ramp up mobile spending.

However, while several vendors focused on museum tours, we discovered that museum professionals were most interested in learning about mobile applications that are NOT tours. They want to know what additional applications are out there to help them take advantage of this new medium and its explosive growth, especially with the introduction of the iPAD.

As museums wake up to new opportunities via the Web and mobile technologies, it will be exciting to see how they optimize the use of these technologies to engage with audiences and advance their missions.

Have questions or comments about this blog post? Please feel free to share them by clicking on the “Comments” link below.  

Trends alter the way we as consumers view the world we live in and the products we use every day. For example, 2009 saw the rise of the “netbook” computer as an auxiliary device for the home or travel, and 2010 has already seen the first launches of tablet-style computers.  As these devices proliferate and we become increasingly reliant on Web-based applications for everyday business, the paperless office and the wireless world we once dreamed of are becoming a reality. At the same time, growing adoption of these various devices means that demand for new content is greater than ever.  
 
What does this mean for me?

Keeping an eye on trends in the marketplace is essential to making your work as a content creator relevant to buyers. For example, trends in the technology sector change not only the way we do business but affect the way we spend our free time. Staying one step ahead of the curve and identifying trends in images that may interest corporate and other clients, including art directors at marketing and advertising firms, editorial outlets and other businesses that use images, may seem like an impossible task. But with all the resources available on the Web it should be part of your business strategy.

Last year, we talked about how in today’s photo marketplace, it helps to cultivate a specialty. Whatever your specialty, trends affect every aspect of your work and how it will be received in the marketplace.  This is the first in an occasional series that will identify upcoming trends and what they may mean for your business. Listed below are some of the big trends from 2009 that will continue to influence us into 2010 and beyond. In future posts, we’ll explore some of these trends in more depth. Meanwhile, keep these trends in mind as you market yourself to clients in the months ahead: 

Going Green Green may be an overused term that covers a very diverse range of industries and topics, but in 2010 there is no denying that it affects all of us. Whether you are talking about renewable energy, reducing carbon emissions or upgrading the windows in your home to save money on power, the thinking behind going green is simple. Save money, create jobs and make the most of what we have.

The Cloud Cloud computing is the phrase of the day in the IT world with more companies moving to cloud-based solutions. Cloud computing is a general term for anything that involves delivering a hosted service over the internet. Software, infrastructure and development platforms are run as a service. All a consumer needs is a computer with an internet connection. Cloud-based computing greatly reduces the cost of running and maintaining servers, software and IT support. The ability to access enormous amounts of data from multiple locations at very low cost is allowing companies across the world to build elaborate applications with easily scalable virtually unlimited amounts of computing resources, customer storage and IT services.

Are there any trends you’re seeing that are important to photographers and are not mentioned above? If so, please let us know by posting them in the comments section below.