FAQFAQ
General Corporate FAQs
- Where is the company located?
- Is the company public?
- Are you hiring?
- Who and how do I contact someone inside the company?
ImageIRC™ FAQs
- What is the ImageIRC™?
- What does the ImageIRC™ do?
- Can my images be part of the ImageIRC™?
- How does the metadata stay with the image?
- What will happen if an image is claimed by different owners?
- If I upload an image to the ImageIRC, do I have to make that image available to all PicScout products?
ImageExchange™ FAQs
- What is the Firefox add-on?
- What do you mean by a “Closed Beta”?
- How does the ImageExchange™ work?
- Who is using the Firefox add-on?
- Why don’t I see the “i” on every image when I do a search?
ImageTracker™ FAQs
- How does PicScout ImageTracker™ work?
- How do agencies and photographers use ImageTracker™ results?
- Can I try the system first?
- How many images do I need to sign up for your services?
- I want to pursue copyright protection, but our agency does not have a legal staff, what are our options?
- Do you only work with agencies and photographers?
- How much does the ImageTracker™ service cost?
- How long does it take before I start seeing reports?
- What's the likelihood that someone is using my images?
- I found a copy of one of my images on a site that you didn't report! Why didn't you find it?
- Do you also track logo designs?
- Do you search for text, video or music?
General Corporate Questions
The company has operations in Herzelyia Israel, with marketing, sales, business development and other support staff operating out of Silicon Valley California and Chicago Illinois.
PicScout is a financially independent, privately held company.
PicScout is always on the lookout for talented people who share our passion for photography and rights management. Please see our current hiring needs at http://www.picscout.com/about-us/careers.html.
Please visit our contact page: http://www.picscout.com/about-us/contact-us.html
ImageIRC™
ImageIRC™ stands for index, registry and connection. It is PicScout’s repository for image information, which is used by our various products like ImageExchange™ and ImageTracker™. The ImageIRC combines an index of fingerprint information that uniquely identifies each image in our index, a registry of metadata about each image, and an API connection that provides access to the ImageIRC for various products and programs.
The ImageIRC™ “fingerprints” images using an advanced image recognition algorithm that identifies unique patterns within the image. Unlike a watermark, this image fingerprint is derived from the image, and therefore cannot be erased, modified or edited. Therefore the image fingerprint allows PicScout to identify images wherever they appear on the Internet, even if the image has been altered, colorized, edited, cropped, rotated or embedded into another image.
Each image fingerprint is associated with its unique metadata, which the image rights owner supplies along with the image. This metadata can include image owner, licensor, license type, landing page, and other important information.
Currently the ImageIRC™ is available to owners of large image catalogs. PicScout accepts a minimum ImageIRC transfer of 30,000 images. If you are a photographer with less than 30,000 images, you can use the PicScout ImageIRC and have your images participate with the ImageExchange through PhotoShelter, ImageSpan, or Flickr for attribution, non-commercial images. In the future, PicScout will provide mechanisms to permit ImageIRC submission by individual rights owners via other 3rd party platforms. To learn more about becoming a 3rd party enabled platform – or to suggest your favorite platform – please contact PicScout.
Image metadata resides on our servers parallel to the image fingerprint. Whenever an image query is submitted to the ImageIRC™ the response includes the relevant metadata.
Any image uploaded to the ImageIRC™ will be matched against all existing entries in the index. In case a match is found with no consistency of image owner details, a notification will be sent out to all parties claiming rights ownership to that image, and the image will be placed in pending mode until ownership issues are resolved.
- If I upload an image to the ImageIRC™, do I have to make that image available to all PicScout products?
No. The rights owner can specify which PicScout products they want to access a specific image. For instance, a specific image may be accessed by ImageTracker™, but not by ImageExchange™ or vice versus.
ImageExchange™
The ImageExchange™ Firefox add-on enables Windows and Mac users to conveniently access all of the image rights information for online images that are indexed in the ImageIRC™. Once the add-on is installed, an “i” appears in the corner of every indexed image. Simply mouse over the “i” to see key information, such as owner information and licensing details, including the primary rights owner, original photographer, image size, resolution, license types and other relevant information. You can even link directly to the owner’s site to purchase or license the image.
Our ImageExchange™ Firefox add-on is a downloadable software product that runs in a web browser. Selected ImageExchange add-on beta users will be considered on the basis of several factors, including global geographic diversity, professional experience and primary area of business focus. For its initial beta rollout, PicScout is distributing the add-on via a multi-week rolling invitation basis. This enables us to improve the product and assure a high quality user experience. After our initial rollout phase, we will make the Firefox add-on available to the general public. A “closed beta” rollout is common practice for large deployment of internet products.
ImageExchange™ accesses the ImageIRC™ in real-time to identify images as users surf the web. Any image that is indexed in the ImageIRC will be identified in the browser window with an “i” icon. Clicking the “i” icon will then reveal the image metadata in a pop-up window.
Currently professional designers, ad agency personnel, creatives and corporate communicators that regularly search for, and purchase, image rights use the Firefox add-on to quickly obtain ownership information for images they see on the Internet. Soon, this capability will be available to anyone that searches for images on the Internet.
The ImageExchange™ “i” only appears in those images that are indexed in the ImageIRC™. Currently there are tens of million of images indexed in the ImageIRC for which rights information is available. If you are aware of rights owners that have not uploaded their catalogs to the ImageIRC, please make them aware of this service so that web surfers can find their rights information at the same time their online images are found.
ImageTracker™
There are many ways to track images on the Internet. Some methods embed digital watermarks into the photo image by adding extra data to the image. Images can then be found by searching for the unique signature of the digital watermark. However, these watermarks can be altered or eliminated from the photo as the image is converted from one file type to another.
A more reliable method is image recognition. This method examines raw image data to identify image "fingerprints" – unique patterns that are part of the image itself. This is the technique PicScout uses. Because this method does not rely on embedded watermarks surviving many forms of digital alterations, image recognition can match even highly manipulated or altered images with their original sources.
PicScout's image recognition algorithms can be tuned to achieve particular individual clients' needs. For example, near real-time matches of images used in editorial contexts, such as news websites, require a different approach than deep crawls of commercial websites, which may have images that are significantly altered from the originals.
ImageTracker™ is a complete solution that provides reports, screen shots, image use URLs and other information so that PicScout clients can pursue copyright infringement legal action where unauthorized image use has been found. ImageTracker locates hundreds of unauthorized uses each day throughout the world.
The ImageTracker™ product conducts web searches customized for individual client needs. Specific websites can be surveyed, or the vast web can be searched to identify images. The image recognition algorithm can also be custom tuned to a broader or narrower level of precision, giving search results that are either very inclusive of all possible image uses (but which contain some false positives), or which identify only those images that have a very high degree of commonality with the source image (but which possibly omit some true positives).
Some clients want to analyze the reach of their images on the Internet, while others want to direct the ImageTracker search methods towards specific websites of licensees so they can invoice them. There are also those who seek to determine where their images are being used to determine if licenses for those uses have been obtained. Where they have not, some clients pursue copyright infringement. Depending on your objectives, you may or may not care if your image is found on a personal Blog or other non-commercial website. We work with you to determine where within the vast web we search and what sort of images to look for.
We search the Internet on a continuous basis, matching images against our clients' catalogs. Our system is designed to work with bulk image catalogs; therefore we cannot accept single image “test cases”.
We have found the cost-benefit tradeoff to be around 30,000 images, which is currently our minimum requirement to use our ImageTracker service for individual photographers and agencies (NOTE: there is no image catalogue size requirement for photographers and agencies for our ImageExchange™ service if you utilize one of our platform partners like PhotoShelter, Flickr, ImageSpan). We do work with partners who can include your images in their services that would enable your images to be serviced by the ImageTracker™ product. To learn more about our partners – please contact us .
Another important consideration is the business objective. Customers that monetize their content through licensing, that track unauthorized uses, or engage in market-focused analytics, will be most likely to find our ImageTracker product cost-effective. Stock photo agencies and higher-end commercial photographers tend to be typical candidates for our services.
What do you do with the tracking results? If you plan on making a case for unauthorized use, you will need to know the entire license history of the image in question. Photos that have been distributed as "royalty-free" (RF) can be passed around without any paper trail, making it nearly impossible to determine if any given website obtained the image legitimately. By contrast, "rights-managed" (RM) images have no such concern, because a single company has either full control or full knowledge over an image's license history.
Even if there is a known sales history, one has to consider the time and resources necessary to retrieve this sales history. For example, many stock photographers send their images to multiple microstock agencies. Unless meticulous sales records have been retained by all your agency representatives, you may not know whether any given usage was unauthorized.
- I want to pursue copyright protection, but our agency does not have a legal staff, what are our options?
Many of our clients find it very helpful to use the legal partners available through our legal network to pursue copyright infringement settlements and cases. These legal partners can handle all aspects of the claims once you determine the legitimate or non-legitimate use of the image. Some clients find this the easiest and fastest way to get started. You can choose to work with the legal partners at the beginning and then choose to bring the activity in-house or you can remain with the legal partners.
Legal partners are currently available in North America, Germany, France and Spain. If you are a lawyer who would like to be considered for the Legal Partner program, please contact us.
We work with anyone that has a large body of image-based content (photos, line-art, cartoons, or even 3D models rendered as 2D graphics). And we can do more than just track image use on the web.
ImageTracker™ can also be used for a variety of other purposes: to find redundant entries in an image catalog; to track syndicated editorial cartoon use on all newspaper websites. Chances are that if you deal with images at your company, PicScout Image recognition technology can bring efficiencies you haven't even thought of.
Our pricing model is based on a number of different metrics. If you're goal is to monetize the images found (either by licensing or unauthorized use claims), we charge based on a percentage of the recovered revenues. If your objective is analytics, we charge based on each qualified match.
We also charge a minimum fee.
Our sales representative can offer a comprehensive price quote once we understand your business needs. If you have more than 30,000 images and are interested in talking about what we can do for you, please contact us. If you have less than 30,000 images but would still like to use our services through one of our partners, please contact us.
The time it takes to enroll image catalogs into the system can vary, depending on the size and nature of how image files are transferred to us.
After each extensive web search, our internal quality assurance makes sure the company details are collected from the websites where images were found in addition to capturing the screen shot(s) to ensure that your legal team receives all the information they need in order to pursue infringement cases. Special services are also offered on an individual basis that reflects the needs of each of our clients.
PicScout has an extensive and robust case management system that facilitates reporting legitimate and non-legitimate uses as well as the ability to provide the information and results to your legal team or through one of the PicScout legal partner members.
As time goes by, the number of reports tends to grow as our web searches become more "intelligent" about the nature of the sites that have your content. As patterns emerge, our tracking improves. PicScout continuously expands it focused web searches based upon relevant territories.
The likelihood of finding your images on other websites is highly dependent on two factors. First, most people find images using major search engines, so the higher your site is ranked, the better the chances your photos are being used by others. By contrast, if your images are only on low-traffic websites, chances are slim that people will have found your site and used your images. A second factor is the age of the photos. Unless you are offering pictures of newsworthy people or events, it often takes considerable time before images are "found" and used by others. So one shouldn’t expect ImageTracker™ to find images that were recently shot or only recently uploaded to the Internet.
Another way images are picked up is through social networks, such as photo sharing sites. We've increasingly found these to be sources where people access new content for both licensed and unlicensed (unauthorized) uses.
Note that if your images are on social networking sites without your permission, this may not be an unauthorized use. Normally one can't file a financial claim against a social networking site, but you can file a take-down notice to request the website removes your photos.
First, we search those sites that our heuristic technology has determined to be the most relevant and likely sites for your business objectives. Second, our technology traverses the net over a period of time; it's entirely possible we will not find all sites that have your images immediately. We welcome all reports on new discoveries so we can assess the relevancy of those sites for future inclusion.
It’s not our core competency. However, we can customize searches. To learn more about this option, please contact us directly.
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