Image/Video copyright solutions [content producers]
 

I'm doing some research at the moment into digital watermarking, and wondered how content producers currently try to manage their copyright issues.

Do you actively enforce your copyrights/licensing, if so, how?

I read Apic's website and from what i gathered, they provide a service whereby they go after the person who has infringed your copyright (is that correct?). Is it your (the producer's) responsibility to find the people who you think are infringing, and then "set Apic on them" ? how does it work?

What type of assistance do you think would help you protect your content?

Do you have a vision of a perfect setup for this biz? (ideas for technology to stop thieves/track+identify them, etc).

I'm trying to get a real world perspective on this area, is there anyone here who has opinions/experience they could share?

APIC is almost useless. How many successful lawsuits where people have been financially compensated for the infringements have come from APIC?

As far as I know APIC takes complaints and then sends out the DMCA emails to the infringers and their hosting companies.

Nobody fears that. If the only penalty to robbing a bank was if i got caught was that they made me put the money back, it would be a good thing to be a bank robber.

Richard, you from DK ?

for sure, i've not read a lot of good press about APIC specifically, but it was the only name that sprung to mind when i was thinking about this stuff.

Mutt, can you gimme a brief run down on how you guys protect your content from being ripped off?

I can see two distinguished areas -

i) detecting a copyright violation
ii) doing something about it

No good in being able to detect it, if you cannot do anything about it i guess?

No. My sig shows the reader the flag of their country - its a demonstration of geo-targeting ;)

it's not my content so i don't have this problem yet.

put a copyright notice on your images and videos, easy to do with cheap software. then take a look around the Web every once in awhile, especially TGPs, and see if anybody's ripping off your content.

Get a lawyer to write you a standard DMCA copyright infringement notice/letter to send out to the infringer, his web hosting company and in the case of a paysite, the third party processor. If the thief is promoting other paysites, send the sponsor an email as well.

Also do screencaps of the pages where your content is being infringed and save the html 'Source' file.

Then decide if the person is worth suing. Most aren't.

do you think people nicking content is a big problem in this industry?

Mutt seeing as you do not have a clue what you are talking about I will forgive you.

APIC have enough teeth to make the sponsors and hosts sit up and take notice. Usually the thief is a smally guy sitting in his back bedroom stealing pictures to put up a website for free. Usually an AVS or TGP poster, simply because they do not have the resources to open a paysite.

If the DMCA is ignored by the webmaster, it is then served higher up the chain. Here is where it is taken notice of. This recipient will look and judge it knowing if he get's it wrong he can face a very expensive lawsuit, against an attorney working on a contingency.

It's at this point that all APIC members are notified to see if the site contains more stolen material, usually if the guy steals from one he steal from many. Then the people with the money to lose discover they are up against a class action.

The advantage of going via APIC is simple, a lawyer will cost many $$$ an hour, you only have you looking for your content. If it comes to the point of suing it is you alone against them. Doing it on your own is next to useless with a lot of webmasters.

But then I suppose the people on this list are all wrong. Maybe they get less pirating than you. *sarcasm*

OK what is your alternative suggestion, as someone who sells exclusive and passes copyright over to the buyer?

That's cool I was about to say are you from Czech? :D

Enought to give APIC a full time job.

But it depends on who you are, some producers have got newsgroups named after them, where you can find their whole site.

Some producers never really have a problem.

Mutt, there is a lot that cne be done to protect content through copyrights.

We have settled a few lawsuits in the past for pretty large amounts of money....

We are currently involved in a federal lawsuit with someone on this board who stold our content. If you register your content with the Federal Copyright Office you can get statutory damages up to $130,000 per image if copyright violation was willful.

Having a good attorney is important...

If you register your pictures with the Federal Copyright Office, a good attorney will take it for a cut of the fine.

Go search for the thread on Gayle at Facon Foto and find out how much she got.

Charly i know APIC well, for a long time.

What Mike does is the only way to take care of business.

Just getting people to dutifully take down the content has done NOTHING, the problem is worse than ever.

So how many people have you sued?

You can still sue people and belong to Paypal, Suze Randall makes a lot of money doing it that way.

You can get APIC to notify you when they find an offending site.

You then join up, search through it, get screen captures documenting when, how and where you found the stolen material. Then get a lawyer to serve a DMCA at $300 an hour on the webmaster, then later on the host, billing company, sponsor, etc.

Then get a court date, prepare your case, go to court and hope the judge does not kick it out becasue he did not get a BJ from his intern that morning.

And at the end if the guys on the other side of the room have any money left, you can repay your bank for the loan you took out on your home. Assuming you don't have the kind of cash it takes, lying around spare.

Me I just want it taken down and the frightners put on the hosts and sponsors. Maybe they will be more careful in future.

But it's a free world you got your way and I will go mine. :) Respect to you. :thumbsup

Yes, getting your content ripped off is a huge problem.

Messing around with a court case, APIC, watermarks or anything else is a waste of time, IMHO.

Go with Digital Rights Management (DRM) to protect your content.

It's the only thing that works.

All other protections and remedies are lame by comparison.

can u explain what you mean?

as long as content cost $$$ it will always be nicked!

APIC is one of the biggest jokes in the industry. Basically from what I understand, it's a just a guy that pretends he's a lawyer.

Unfortunately, he doesn't (or at least didn't) list any real contact info and seems to be in hiding (probably from the truth). He goes around picking fights with hosting companies and webmasters without knowing any facts. He claims to represent people that he does not. And at this point, most hosts I know just delete anything he sends them.

The word twit comes to mind.

So all the companies the sight says are members are lies. How did he also manage to get his logo on their sites?

So a hosting company just ignores a DMCA notice, like AC did when Perfect 10 served one, wise move.

So how do you protect your copyright?

I belong to APIC and see the e-mails that go out and see the sites go down, Mike on the other hand knows everything cos he spoke to a guy at a show who was just speaking to another guy about APIC. Who also was repeating a rumour.

Can you give me some details on this, I've looked at many other options and they were way to expensive.

The problem is simple, the guy stealing it isn't worth a damn. The host will 9 time out of 10 pull a site down if he thinks he has a genuine risk of ending up in court.

That makes protecting copyright for YOUR CLIENTS a service to them rather than a service to yourself.

Give me the URL of DRM please.

CCBill have a great DRM solution just announced. :2 cents:

@Charly

Yes, she did and she als takes the "advantage" that a producer (Henry) is dead now and it's not that easy any longer to verify who holds the copyrights of the photos

Actually I did have dealings with APIC, and not good dealings. It ended with a hearty Go Fuck Yourself and a threat by us for damages due to tortious interference with business operations and harassment.

I'm not sure if you know this or not, we do business with EVERYBODY. We talk.

For years, APIC was claiming to represent Playboy. Where's the logo on Playboy's site?

How do I protect my content? Simple. We do business with everybody. We respect them. They respect us. Things magically happen. It comes from 8 years in the business.

Plus we have a full time lawyer in house and 6 other law firms on retainer and have a pretty good history of being reasonable, right, and winning.

I am currently researching image watermarking (invisibly, encoded inside the image/video) as a part of my degree. The idea is that you mark the image in way that it does not distort it perceptually, but in a way that the mark can be extracted.

I'm trying to make my research applied, and it got me thinking of what it could be used for in this industry.

Some Ideas
---------------
Content producers could include a watermark in their image/video content. If someone wanted to check if an image was being used, they could use a tool to detect the watermark, and perhaps authenticate it against a database which represented the terms of the license (perhaps using the content on X domains for eg). So everyone who bought content from producers using the system, would be able to prove that they had a license for the image (as the license is effectively built invisibly inside each image).

One feature would be the producer could say to the system "check out www.suspect-site.com", and a spider would search the site for all their images, and analyse them for copyright infringement. It could also be generally spidering the pages, or perhaps constantly spidering submitted pages.

This could also be integrated into TGP/listing sites. The TGP would use the system to check that each gallery submitted had correctly watermarked images.

Could also be extended to sponsor programs, in that they could verify that their affiliates were not using unlicensed content.

I'm keen to take on any feedback you guys have on these ideas.

I think it would be very cool; one could monitor all the big TGPs/listing sites, spidering the galleries and detecting/reporting any content abuse.