After finding his own work stolen online, photographer and entrepreneur Daniel Foster was frustrated at the difficulty he faced in resolving the issue. Beyond the amount of time it takes to search for unauthorized use, few resources are available to help artists when their work is stolen, especially outside their own countries.
If any product hunters would like to try Pixsy, you can email info@pixsy.com. We're always open to feedback to make our product better. Thanks for your support!
@chrismessina The service is completely free to search up to 5,000 photos. There are no up-front fees for seeking compensation, just a 50% success fee for all royalties collected. Many stock photo sites charge commissions of up to 80%.
We have an unlimited DMCA takedown add-on for $9.99 / month, which we think is a good value given how time-consuming it is to draft and send multiple takedowns.
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Hunter
@danielfoster437 So, I noticed one of Pixsy's features is the ability to enforce copyright worldwide, which is definitely something we had issues with when it came to foreign infringements. Are you able to talk more about the legal/organizational infrastructure that makes this capability possible?
Do you have relationships in place with legal teams around the world, or is it handled in-house? Which countries are you best equipped to enforce copyright in, and where do you have weak areas, either due to the rollout process or copyright laws that are unfriendly to creators?
@spyhi We aren't in every country, and are actively working to expand our presence internationally. We currently have legal counsel in the US, Canada, UK, and Germany, and also handle licensing issues in-house. Some countries may have good laws on the books but poor legal systems, and others have a general lack of awareness about intellectual property that make moving forward difficult. We are looking for solutions for every country.
This is a great tool for content producers. It will also be used by German lawyers that are going to intimidate people so that they will settle for a ludicrous fee. A friend of me received a letter because he used a small image of a map on his site. It costed him several hundreds of dollars.
@seysconstantijn Pixsy only steps in cases where the image use is commercial or organizational and there is no legitimate fair use argument. Of course, content creators are free to take action on their own as well. Most are pretty reasonable. It's hard to weigh in on your friend's situation without knowing all the details.
On a side note, we've actually encountered very little image theft in Germany.
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One feature request I have -- keyboard shortcuts. I get that there are no perfect matches... but after clicking through a 100 of them, my wrist is demanding I switch the mouse to the other hand.
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additional feature requests:
1) toggle setting to set non-commercial as default mode
2) button to notify pixsy when something is mislabeled as non-commercial instead of commercial
3) date sortable flagging history in case you accidentally flag a photo and need to retrieve it
@marcuscoh Thanks Marcus, we'll make sure to consider these. I especially like the keyboard shortcut idea.
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Sounds like an awesome service. The industry definitely needs more and better services in this category.
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Hunter
My wife is a photographer. She's not world-famous, though she has at least one world-famous picture. http://dallasnagatawhite.com/201...
When "Lava Kiss" (the internet's name, not ours) went viral, we totally lost control of the image. It's used a lot without our permission, but we've all but given up chasing all but the most egregious infringements--like sites selling "male enhancement." The story isn't unique by any means, even among the rest of her body of work. It almost seems like the price of promoting yourself as a photographer--by putting your images online--is having your images taken and used for free, whether you like it or not, and often for money. We've been looking for a solution, but never really found anything like Pixsy. It's new and in open beta, so the jury is still out, but I'm hoping it's every bit as good as it sounds...it would make her life as a pro trying to make a living a lot easier!
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I ran Pixsy through the ringer today. Found a few places where there was no attribution and in one case commercial use. :|
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