SAA Trial Reveals High Rate of Commercial Misuse of Getty Images Online

January 28, 2005. MIAMI, FL -- (MARKET WIRE) -- The StockArtistsAlliance (SAA) and PicScout today announced the initial results of their much-anticipated study about misuse of SAA members' images. For the purpose of the trial SAA members provided 13,000 of their Right Managed images which are represented by Getty Images. "By eliminating images with known licenses for Internet use during the past year we increased the accuracy and usefulness of the Study," said Betsy Reid, SAA's Executive Director. The images were uploaded to PicScout Image Tracker System and then compared with images from commercial websites in North America and Germany. "We were astonished to find out these images were found 11 times the rate of the average that PicScout finds," said Eyal Gura, PicScout's CEO. This figure is based on PicScout's accumulative customer database of two million stock images.

Applying the same rate of misuse of images to the full Getty Images collection could mean tens of millions of dollars in lost revenues to both photographers and Getty Images. "We have provided Getty with the first PicScout reports and are confident that they will be responsive to this important new information by investigation of these cases and recovery of otherwise lost revenue," said Betsy Reid
"The average rate of infringements on the web is 90%. This means that for each image that is properly licensed, there are nine images that are being used on commercial websites without being licensed," added Eyal Gura.

PicScout and SAA intend to continue this trial which is expanding to search images from other distribution outlets, and are committed to jointly act to better educate the industry about the importance of rights management and policing of image usage online.

Notice on SAA Trial Results 01/28/2005
As Getty Images is the largest distributor of images in the world, it is expected that images distributed by Getty Images would be found at a much higher rate then other images on the Internet. The rate of usage of Getty Images found by the SAA and PicScout trial is well correlated with the popularity of the Getty website and the quality of images distributed by Getty Images. PicScout and SAA will continue to report the online misuses to Getty and hope to assist Getty and its contributors further on.

About SAA
SAA is a global trade organization dedicated to the interests of Rights Managed stock photographers. Information about SAA's programs and initiatives at http://www.stockartistsalliance.org

For information or interviews contact:
Betsy Reid, SAA mailto: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it  

About PicScout
PicScout is a leading technology provider to the stock photography industry. The company offers solutions for image owners to control and protect their images in the information age. PicScout's image recognition solution enables the comparison of image databases with individual images that are being used in commercial web sites. Based on this technology, PicScout provides a number of services to the stock photography industry. These services enable stock photo agencies to enforce their copyrights, better control their assets, develop new billing methods and increase their customer base. PicScout manages more than one and a half million images for the world's most prestigious image libraries.

For further information contact us at:

PicScout
Ze'ev Rozov
VP Sales & Marketing
Tel +972-9-9548005
Cel +972-54-4402626
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or visit us at http://www.picscout.com