Dreamstime, one of the world’s leaders in photo licencing and largest stock photo communities, has launched a proprietary copyright tracking tool, LicenseGuard. The tool will monitor, detect, and flag potentially unlicenced usages of the agency’s visual content across the Internet, using AI-powered scanning technology, visual recognition algorithms, and human review. LicenseGuard includes cease and desist mechanisms and post-usage options, allowing Dreamstime’s contributors and copyright notice recipients to resolve claims quickly and fairly.
“LicenseGuard is designed to safeguard the copyright of content creators and motivate image users to follow industry-accepted ethical practices. It ensures that copyright owners’ work is protected and remunerated while image users can secure a carefree media usage experience with the appropriate license agreement,” Dreamstime’s CEO Serban Enache explains.
The tool checks and matches images in Dreamstime’s library across the web, so all the agency’s contributors benefit from the tool for free and without specific enrollment. Dreamstime currently hosts and markets 185 million images for approximately 875,000 contributors, thus making it an extensive database for copyright tracking.
Notices sent to infringers include Dreamstime’s specially designed Universal Royalty-Free and Extended licences that grant post-usage permission for unlicenced media in use. The agency expects a high success rate in solving its copyright infringement claims by supplying this licence rather than just the traditional monetary settlement, often perceived as aggressive copyright enforcement.