Creative Licensing: Attribute. License. Create Value.
For users, 'doing the right thing' becomes easy. For image curators and owners, income is assured and audited.
BACKGROUND
Following informal research, in 2013 we were awarded a London Fusion grant to complete an initial study on Image Discovery in collaboration with Kingston University. This led to the development of contacts with museums, galleries and collections and industry bodies representing the sector, and the Copyright Hub. In 2015 we were awarded a grant by the Digital Catapult to develop an image licensing demonstrator website as a Copyright Hub use case. This press photography themed site, www.ronburtonphotographer.com, which we host and support, was an initial collaboration with Getty Images and Mirrorpix. It went live in December 2015 and will be updated with additional content and upgraded with enhanced functionality within the coming months. We have also managed the Copyright Hub enabled streamlined licensing of Mirrorpix images featured in a Lottery funded Birmingham Hippodrome Heritage project.
As part of our work in this area, and in association with the Copyright Hub, we ran a Round Table for industry influencers on 'Exploring the Future of Image Licensing' on 6th April. Creative Licensing is also a Digital Catapult case study.
For more info on Creative Licensing, including copies of our Image Discovery research report and the slides summarising the outcomes from our 'Exploring the Future of Imag Licensing' Round Table please email us at info@i-publishingconsultants.com.
SERVICE FEATURES AND BENEFITS FOR IMAGE OWNERS
Creative Licensing provides a complete image rights evaluation and solutions creation process to enable different types of image owners and curators to generate more value from the images they either own, manage or look after.
We will enable image owners and curators to:
- Streamline their existing licensing processes
- Generate wider use of their images online
- Profit from increased revenues
- Measure image usage
We will provide full journey support from business appraisal to capture, design, and implementation with on-going business and technical support.
Integration with the Copyright Hub means images are re-discoverable, beyond the silos of individual systems or institutions – so no lock in (even to us).
Our software-as-a-service model means participating organisations will require little up-front investment in hardware and software.
INNOVATION
Creative Licensing will help image owners – and those with responsibilities to rights holders – to innovate in various ways: from developing a clear strategy for promoting the images they own or manage, through to the development of a fully automated, streamlined licensing, e-commerce-enabled website, with embedded Copyright Hub functionality, and potential merchandising / other commercial opportunities. It enables small value, standard transactions to be handled automatically by the website, leaving the rights-owner free to negotiate more valuable uses of the images with interested users. Meanwhile, rights enquiries that have come to the wrong place can be automatically redirected to the correct licensor, saving time on both sides.
Creative Licensing's clients will be able to take more control over how they manage, market and account for their image assets and also benefit from the indexing and other facilities being developed by the Copyright Hub and service providers such as ourselves.
COPYRIGHT HUB USE CASE
The idea for the Ron Burton press photography website (www.ronburtonphotographer.com) came originally from a historical blog post by ex Sunday Times travel photographer Philip Dunn in 2008, which, while now no longer available, is reproduced with Philip's permission on the Ron Burton site here: http://www.ronburtonphotographer.com/article/picture-inspired-mehy-2/.
Through a series of discussions and also coincidences, the project became a collaboration with the Digital Catapult / Copyright Hub, as a 'use case' project demonstrating Copyright Hub enabled image licensing: a simply designed, easy-to-manage and update, open source software based, essentially non-commercial website 'referencing and celebrating the work of Ron Burton, the award winning press photographer, who won the British Press Photographer of the Year award in 1958, 1962 and also 1965'.
In the first instance, we have been working with Mirrorpix and also Getty Images to select and feature on the site just an initial selection of some of the many hundreds of Ron's photos already available for license from their sites, (including the iconic '1965 selfie' Red Arrows image featured in Philip Dunn's post above which we now know was just one of the images on two rolls of film featuring many other shots from that adventure.)
The site went live in December, with embedded Copyright Hub enabled licensing links back to the Mirrorpix and Getty sites, (in addition to written/logo credits), to ensure that anyone interested in licensing these images or seeing what else of relevant interest may be available at Mirrorpix/Getty Images, can do so simply and automatically. This is a development on the simple demo features already in place on the 4Corners images represented on our own website.
In due course we'll be refining the site's features and processes and adding more of Ron Burton's photos which, as a result of the research this project has stimulated, have been identified in the Mirrorpix archive. Meanwhile we are keen to discuss other possible test / use case projects with image rights owners and/or their representatives.