Thursday, July 16, 2009

c-registry of images

During my research I seemed to have become very interested in the issues revolving around images that are orphan works. A company called C-Registry is an example of an online service that can make it easier to find the creator/owner of an image. There are fees involved, but they have basic services for free. It seems a creator has to pay $25 a year, but that comes with authentication and an upgrade in services. The following is more info found on the company's blog:


What the creator gets for that $25/year is an upgrade in services that includes the ability to lock records so others can’t change them and a growing list of special or bulk functions, such as bulk upload of URL’s to register and bulk display of usage records. Our next upgrade is a service that’s in high demand and available elsewhere at a much, much higher price. By growing value, we expect to broaden the range of participating creators to include amateurs and “prosumers” from sites like Flickr who are willing to pay $2 per month for these functions.


It seems like a very well organized site that males it easy for people to contact the creator to negotiate use and fees of an image. The following video has a very nice explanation of how all of this works:



References:

http://www.c-registry.us/

http://c-registry-copyright-forum.blogspot.com/



1 comment:

LuMarie said...

Fascinating. I looked at the website and they had some interesting comments in their "about us" section. It seems that they use image recognition, and I think it's a really interesting idea, but I'm confused over the span of the project. Is it only for artists/photographers that register with the site? It didn't seem clear on their website. I'm also wondering if it's going to become a requirement that libraries etc. check sites like this to determine if something is an orphan work.