Many issues within the world of Visual Arts impact organizations in different ways. Stock Agencies and Clip Art Firms face issues relating to Art Theft and the Rights of Art Objects. Many stock agencies encounter photo-licensing issues, posing many questions about a photo’s legal usability, while Clip Art Firms encounter copyright issues. With the accessibility of the Internet, stock photography and clip art theft and questions of ownership rights have lead to the creation of protective laws such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and using high-tech approaches to combating copyright infringement.
Recently, online stock agencies, like GettyImages.com, have started to scan the Web for illegal use of their images. In 2005, Getty upgraded its in-house technology to determine whether a photo is being used without permission and signed up for a service from an Israeli company called PicScout Inc. PicScout creates digital "fingerprints" for images, allowing it to locate pictures even if a stealthy thief changes a photo by cropping it, resizing it, altering its color or changing its filename. It then sends Web crawlers scurrying through the Internet looking for images, trying to match them to the more than four million copyrighted photos in its database . PicScout charges Getty, and their other major clients, a corporate fee and collects a percentage of the revenue they regain when they bill those who are stealing the images and has established a subscription service for self-employed photographers.
Another company, Digimarc Corp., places a “digital watermark” on photos for sites like Corbis and individual photographers. Images stamped with this watermark appear to be normal. Digimarc provides software that can be downloaded from their website to m ...