Those who follow this site regularly know that I am a strong proponent of Copyright protection from photographers. If you’re someone who doesn’t care if people use your work without your permission, this information won’t be valuable to you. But if you do care about it, you need to know about ImageRights and their new recovery service. As far as I know this is the first service of its kind that allows you to actually recover damages from infringers.
ImageRights International launched its ImageRights Recovery service today. ImageRights works with photographers to recover settlement fees from websites that have published images without a license. You can sign up for their Basic Recovery service for free and receive 50% of any revenue they collect. Paid accounts receive as much as 65%. They also search more than 80 million web pages a month monitoring for use of your photos and then notify you when they find copies or derivatives of them.
To strengthen your case against future infringers, they’ll register your images with the US Copyright Office for you for a reasonable fee if you find that you are too busy to hassle with it yourself. Registration is critical to effectively recover settlement fees from those who steal your images. You can read more about their services at www.imagerights.com.
If you’re already an ImageRights customer you can contact them to sign up for this service.
Oh one more thing. If you’re an infringer, this news should make you nervous :)
Disclosure: Scott Bourne sits on the Image Rights Board of Advisors
