If you shoot exclusive content for websites, are a distributor of content, or a content producer, I am ready now to push 2257lookup.com service to help your customers with their 2257 compliance.
Here is how the 2257lookup service works:
As a content provider, you would sign our agreement form to participate in the service that protects your content. In the contract, it says that in the event that my company is sold, the content does not go to the new company. This was an important issue with content producers who are participating in this service because of me, and don't want their entire library to go to some new company that they don't know. This is about building relationships and so our agreement does not allow for any transferring or selling of your images/data to any company.
Once you have signed the agreement, we work on how to get your entire image library to me. I have been sending out external USB HD to clients, as well as receiving CD/DVD and FTP access.
Every image that you have licensed or provided to a website, would be sent to me for indexing. Each image is processed and stored into a master database of known images.
Websites will contract with 2257lookup to scan their websites and hard drives for images. Each image from a website will be run through our ImageDiff Engine (tm) program that can match images of different sizes/resolutions.
The end result of the scan is a report that is emailed to the webmaster that has in one column, the URL/filename, another column that breaks down the original filename and set the image belongs to, and the content provider.
This tab delimited report can be imported into webmaster's content management system, or used on its own to be able to figure out which content provider needs to be contacted to get 2257 info for the images licensed.
The webmaster is then able to go to the content provider and tell them which ID's they need.
I know that some content providers are reluctant to hand out Model ID (and for very good reasons), others are providing blackened out versions.
My next post will be to talk about a proposed industry solution to handle the issue of handing over model ID info.
Participating in 2257lookup is FREE for content providers. 2257lookup charges websites for the lookup service.
By participating in the service, you are helping your customers be compliant with the current and proposed 2257 requirements.
You will also be getting marketing exposure via 2257lookup's activities for being apart of the service.
Current Content provider's, participating in the service:
Content Producers:
Matrix Content, Falcon Foto, Paul Markham, Focus Adult, Ounique
Content Distributors:
Max Pixels, Medium Pimpin, Zmaster, Xamo
Exclusive:
Titan Media, Home Grown Video
There are many more content providers in the process of signing up, but now I am making a push to reach as many content providers as possible.
For webmasters, if you are looking to handle the huge problem of identifying where every single image comes from, 2257lookup does provide a solution. If you don't see a content provider that you use on the list above, contact them and ask them to learn about 2257lookup and to participate in the service. It's free for content providers.
The system can only make matches if the content is already in our master database. Images without matches will have a blank space, so you can always figure out through process of elimination, which content producer is missing and to contact them.
Once your system is scanned for images, it doesn't need to be re-scanned when new content provicers come into the database. Images that didn't have matches will be automatically re-processed against new content and results will be sent to you.
Pricing has not been set for webmasters to use the service. I need to get as many content producers onboard as possible, to do the best job possible in helping out webmasters.
The above text gives the background, the website
http://www.2257lookup.com has some additional info. Feel free to contact me via ICQ or email so we can chat further about the service.
-brandon