Stock Agency Dreamstime Finds Creative, Kinder Way To Deal With Copyright Theft

Not many people can claim to fully grasp copyright concepts, and this uncertainty makes it all too easy for the layperson to stumble into legal trouble. For the most part, copyright holders don’t care if people are accidental infringers because they stand to gain from the confusion.

As they say, you learn from your mistakes. While this usually involves some pain, royalty-free photo site Dreamstime is adopting a gentler approach. Instead of punishing violators, the agency is educating them about the dos and don’ts of copyright while offering revised licenses for post-usage permission.

This way, contributors and copyright notice recipients will be able to settle misunderstandings more “quickly and fairly.” It also gives Dreamstime a chance to convert first-time offenders into customers, PetaPixel reports.

The more forgiving stance stems from the fact that most violations are unintentional. In these instances, the platform asserts that litigation is not always the best answer—penalizing people only repels them from using your services or those of other stock agencies.

So when the company launched its proprietary AI piracy-tracking tool, called ‘LicenseGuard’, this year, it outlined how it could also deal with infringements in a way where everyone wins in the long term.

The program combs the internet for unlicensed downloads of Dreamstime’s images. If it is found that an unauthorized usage is an honest mistake and has only occurred once, the stock photo site will present the infringer with a special license granting post-usage permission for unlicensed images while teaching the user about copyright practices.

The approach is “designed to safeguard the copyright of content creators and motivate image users to follow industry-accepted ethical practices,” describes Dreamstime’s CEO Serban Enache.

If need be, repeat offenders who consistently ignore warnings will be dealt with LicenseGuard’s “cease and desist mechanisms.”

Royalty-free asset libraries tend to be aggressive even with unknowing infringers. What many of them have failed to realize is that first-timers are potential clients who will more likely trust the business that makes them feel safe and understood.

“Infringements are hard to handle internationally, and legal proceedings are difficult to handle by individual creators. We offer a tool that builds upon an already existing image catalog and reaches worldwide to educate on copyright and supply reasonable settlement solutions before moving to further legal actions for content creators and infringers,” says Enache.

[via PetaPixel, Inside Imaging, Business Wire, cover image via efes / Pixabay (CC0)]