From their website:
ImageRights uses its industrial strength crawler technology to continuously scan business sites, blogs, news and media sites and … indexes millions of new images that the crawler finds every month. We then use powerful image recognition technology to compare the images from these sites to your images in order to detect where they are being used.
Plagiarism is a plaque that has become a major part the internet; I for one has been a victim of such practice by some big names in the local electronic media market, unlike ImageRights, I discovered the heavily modified photograph by accident, unlike ImageRights, I identified the used artwork by bare eyes, unlike ImageRights, it didn’t yield any financial settlement nor legal action. Unlike ImageRights, business continue as usual and it took a simple (cheap and friendly) precaution from my end: watermarking. (the purported image was a personal work and doesn’t belong to any of my clients).
ImageRights enlisted 5 personas as their executive team, but not a single word is mentioned about the technology being used to empower the “Industrial strength crawler technology”, and despite the upfront registration fee and monthly cost, the website also fails to mention the split-scheme or scenario or relevant facts like what sort of requirements from the customer’s end to proof the ownership of the “surrendered” photographs.
What’s even more interesting is the industry partners ImageRights is said to be proud of, none of it (at this time of this writing) is where the real shooters hang out, not a photo agency, neither a big name publishing operation, nor a single photo hosting/stock agency who everyone uses, like Flickr, Corbis, iStockPhoto, etc. to name a few.
Now the real question is, would you be willing to surrender your images provided the above facts? Would you be willing to pay some artificial Batmans to cop your images at night and catch any cheap shots for using your image unauthorized?
I’ll take my chances and stick with my watermarks. Even if someone comes to steal my image, so be it, you’re welcome!