Online Copyright Management

THE PROBLEM: PROTECTING COPYRIGHT 

Photobanks and news agencies host millions of images and sell them as their principal line of business. Once an image is sold to a customer, tracking its usage virtually impossible.

For example, if a company buys an image to build its corporate website, and an average internet users likes this image and downloads it to build he is own website, this individual will be illegally using this image, probably without even knowing it.

DEEP AND EXTENSIVE WEB-CRAWLING IS NOT POSSIBLE

Existing solutions offer an approach that uses web-crawling to look for all images on the web and compare them with your own asset. Such solutions offer very interesting results in a very wide scope. Unfortunately, they usually fail at "Deep Crawling" the web, which means crawling web site that require authentication, or serve images in a complex cascade of dynamic AJAX or non HTML codes. Our approach is complementary with these web-crawling approaches.

THE SOLUTION - COLLABORATIVE PROTECTION

LTU is the proud creator and provider of the LTU registry system, which stocks the digital signatures all of the participating photobank and news agency catalogues. This repository offers copyright information and image DNAs for as many as 100 million stock and news photos. Its goal is to serve as a free and open copyright clearinghouse to help protect copyright of stock and news photos online.