Automated Licensing, Rights Management for Digital Artists By Michelle Megna
September 11, 2008
If you sell digital content — artwork, photos, music, video — and want to simplify the licensing, distributing and payment processes, LicenseStream may be the answer.
LicenseStream enables easy assignment of revenues to multiple parties, while providing quick and efficient registration, rights management and transaction settlement capabilities — all in an automated service. It is the brainchild of Iain Scholnick and his business partner, who founded ImageSpan in 2003 to administer the technology, just launched in several tiers of services.
"The secret of the Internet is that, say you go to iTunes and download and pay for a song, people think the transaction is all done, and that's not true," said Scholnick. "With digital content, there are royalties to be paid and lots of people involved, the artist, the studio, maybe an affiliate, so the transactions are complex and a lot of these creative types who sell online are doing all that manually. We came up with LicenseStream to act as a sort of air-traffic control system to automate all that, it does all the math and back-end stuff for you."
ImageSpan has three licensing applications:
LicenseStream Enterprise (LSe) LicenseStream Enterprise delivers a licensing and billing platform to manage the complete media transaction cycles of: rights, permissions, pricing assignment, license generation, e-commerce management, royalty and billing settlement for existing and newly-created media content.
LicenseStream Creator (LSc) LicenseStream Creator uses the underlying power of the LicenseStream Enterprise solution while tailoring it to meet the needs of individual content creators. The service is available at two levels:
LicenseStream Creator enables users to register, describe, license, manage their photo and video content library, publish and receive royalties. Users pay a commission fee of 10 percent in addition to the special introductory subscription fee of $39.99, which includes 2 GB of secure, backed-up storage.
LicenseStream Creator Pro, which builds on all the benefits of LicenseStream standard. A more robust "business ready" solution, LicenseStream Pro offers additional licensing, reporting and publishing flexibility and options. LicenseStream Pro users pay a commission fee of five percent per transaction in addition to the annual subscription fee of $99.99, which includes 10 GB of secure, backed-up storage.
For both LicenseStream Creator and LicenseStream Creator Pro users, the company offers unlimited additional storage sold at bulk rates, packaged in 5, 10, 25 and 50 GB packages.
CurbStream (CS): CurbStream provides local content through a hosted service that reaches more than 10,000 videographers, according to ImageSpan. The videographers shoot and upload video that is immediately rights cleared and licensable for advertising, editorial, and commercial broadcast or online display.
Though anyone can subscribe to these plans as stand-alone services, if artists are working within Adobe, they can access LicenseStream via plug-ins for the Adobe Photoshop Lightroom photography workflow software and the popular Adobe Creative Suite 3 software, which provides a broad spectrum of creative options for all facets of print, Web, film and video production.
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