It’s always nice to write about good news in this space; ito occurs with far too little regularity. Today’s good news is about a deal involving a voluntary agreement on photo licensing. As announced by the PLUS (Picture Licensing Universal System) coalition in a recent press release:

Three major publishers have called for the adoption of the PLUS (Picture Licensing Universal System) standards by picture archives, photographers and all other image suppliers. Representatives of McGraw Hill, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and Pearson each announced that they will adopt the PLUS Picture Licensing Glossary definitions in their contracts, and that they encourage image suppliers to begin embedding PLUS license metadata in all images within one year. The publishers voiced their support at the “PLUS Takes Root in the Publishing Industry” event hosted by the Picture Archive Council of America, during their International Conference in New York City.

(Disclaimer: the Picture Archive Council of America is a Copyright Alliance member, as is Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, part of Reed Elsevier.)

This agreement means three major publishers will be working with a common licensing technology that will be used by all sorts of visual artists along with archivists, museums, libraires, etc. It allows photographs to be properly identified and commercial transactions to be facilitated, to be overly simplistic about it. Bill Rosenblatt of DRM Watch has a nice description of it, in which he says this:

Standardization of licensing terms should also lead to a more economically efficient market for stock images, because licensees will be better able to make apples-to-apples comparisons of rights among licensors and to license only the rights they need…

PLUS is on a positive, if deliberate, trajectory as it labors to keep its many constituents happy while developing its specs and its momentum. It’s close to our ideal of an open standard: pragmatic, focused, not over-engineered, and an economic win-win for all parties.

Given the number of parties involved, you could add a few more “wins” to that description, but I nit-pick. We very much like market-driven win-wins here at the Copyright Alliance.

Share this:

This entry was posted on Monday, November 17th, 2008 at 5:28 pm by Patrick Ross and is filed under drm, licensing, market forces. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.