PicScout participates at Technology and Orphan Works: the State of the Art by the U.S. Copyright Office

San Francisco, CA, USA, December 2007 – Today, PicScout announces its participation at the "Technology and Orphan Works: The State of the Art" by the U.S. Copyright Office in efforts to support the photography industry, and provide with a comprehensive large scale solution for the image users across the globe. With expertise in the field of image and text analysis, content management, web crawling and filtering, PicScout has established itself as a market leader for content monitoring, serving the world’s most prestigious visual collections.

During 2005, the Copyright Office studied issues raised by “orphan works”— copyrighted works whose owners may be impossible to identify and locate. Concerns had been raised that the uncertainty surrounding ownership of such works might needlessly discourage subsequent creators and users from incorporating such works in new creative efforts, or from making such works available to the public.

Once the Office was aware of the problem, it issued a Federal Register Notice summarizing issues raised by orphan works, in an effort to find a proper solution. The solution is required to enable any image buyer or user to perform diligent search and locate the owner of the image, prior to the commencement of an infringement. PicScout was invited to present at the Technology day, as an opportunity to showcase the Copyright Clearance System which is ready to be activated to the public of users.

"We are honored to be a part of the Technology and Orphan Works educational day. As a player in the photography industry, PicScout finds it important to support the Photography Associations by introducing a friendly online search engine to enable content users to locate the origin of the image they wish to use. As we currently monitor millions of images of the leading stock photo agencies and libraries, I feel it is imperative to protect their contributors work", said Maya Bar, Director of Marketing & Sales, PicScout.

About PicScout
With offices in San Francisco, CA and Herzelia, Israel, PicScout (www.picscout.com) is the leading technology-enabled services provider to the digital content industry. PicScout offers solutions, for visual assets owners and users, to better control and distribute their proprietary visual files across all media. These solutions are based on proprietary image and video recognition technology, advanced Internet crawling capabilities and a robust system that compares millions of files 24X7. The company's Image Tracker™ is the industry standard for visual assets tracking, serving millions of visual files of the world's most prestigious content owners.