The Court of Appeals for the State of Washington has rendered a decision against Corbis to the tune of some 12.75 million dollars. Great articles here at Register.co.uk and here at Geek.com.
According to the Appellate Court’s opinion, in 2004 Corbis hired a company known as Infoflows to, “develop a system to track and manage the licensed and unlicensed use of Corbis repository of digital images” (emphasis added). As some of you may know, several years back Corbis had been found by the Federal Court in New York to have had inadequate tracking procedures in place with respect to the physical location of analogue and digital images which went missing after being entrusted by their creators to Corbis.
In Washington State (the home of Corbis and it’s preferred jurisdiction), the jury found in favor of Infoflows on it’s claims that Corbis had fraudulently induced Infoflows, misappropriated the trade secrets owned by Infoflows and then against Corbis on all claims it asserted against Infoflows. The jury originally awarded Infoflows some 36 million dollars. That award has apparently been reduced to “just” 12.75 million. It has been reported that Corbis will appeal.
For the brave among you, the entire 34 page decision can be found as a Word Doc here.
We bring you this news primarily to emphasize the simple fact that no one, nobody, no entity can track the use -authorized or unauthorized – of your imagery better than you can. You can and should care more than any agent, rep or stock agency about your images being infringed. The assumption that stock agencies can track infringements of their contributors more effectively than their contributors because they are bigger or more technologically savvy, is a classic example of conventional wisdom which is neither.
Recall that the courts struck down Corbis’ method of filing its contributors’ copyrights. See our thecopyrightzone.com article entitled Important Decision on Corbis Copyright Filings.
File your registrations yourself. Police your own work. Hire your own lawyer(s). Your copyrights are your most important business asset. Don’t outsource their care and feeding to anyone.
Ed & Jack
#1 by Matt Timmons on May 18, 2012 - 9:18 pm
Does there exist or can you recommend any useful tracking software? I’ve heard of some stuff that was in development but never heard of anything (in the mainstream at least) making it to the shelves.
#2 by Jack and Ed on May 22, 2012 - 2:16 pm
Dear Matt:
How about something that is effective and won’t cost you a dime? Go to images.google.com and click on the tiny camera icon on the right in the search field to upload an image from your files and into the search browser. From there, Google scours the internet for websites employing your image and similar images. That process is not perfect but it has been pretty effective for us and we recommend it to our clients. What most people forget is that the most “profitable” types of infringements like use(s) on: shirts, packaging, posters, bill boards and at trade shows will likely not show up on any web search. Thus there is no perfect system.
There are “services” like Pic Scout who will, for a fee, scour the net for you BUT be aware that most such searches cover only a miniscule portion of the web. Probably only a tiny fraction of 1% of the web can be searched. With the exponential growth of and daily additions to the web, that percentage decreases. These type of services want you to sign up and let them prosecute any infringements they might find for you for an additional and substantial fee. That is their profit center as it is with agents and stock agencies. You never, ever give that right away.
Stay vigilant and periodically and regularly use Google images and go to sites that you think are likely to steal your work. One day we will do a column on the bizarre ways some of our clients discovered that their works were being stolen by others.
Ed