I’m in the middle of trying to get my gear together for a quick trip to the US to shoot a calendar job but, I spent some time today looking at something you need to know about. Tin Eye, if it delivers everything it promises to, will ignite the issue of photographer’s copyright and intellectual property theft.

It’s currently in beta and you need an invite to use it but, here’s a quick synopsis; you download a browser plug in then, go to a page of images online and right click the image, ask it to search through TinEye and boom! it will tell you of any others versions of that same image online.

It’s still in Beta and, they say that they are limited to about 700 million images online but, clearly, the technology is now here to find thefts of your images easily and cheaply. Currently, Tin Eye is free but, I suspect that will change once they get the bugs ironed out. That said, if they manage to make it cheap enough for the average Joe, well, look for some thorough and abrupt ass covering as notorious online thieves suddenly get caught in the open.

Now would be a good time to be an IP lawyer, I suspect some of them are going to be getting busier in the next 24 months.

In the meantime, give me a week or so. I’ll play with TinEye some more and report my findings.

Coming Soon: Flickr makes dramatic changes to it’s terms and conditions and it’s operating structure

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 20th, 2008 at 6:23 pm and is filed under commercial photography.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.