The 4th international Photo Metadata Conference was held last week in Dublin in conjunction with the Cepic Congress.

Now all presentations are available for download on the Conference website www.phmdc.org :

-          Sarah Saunders on how to organise photo metadata workflows

-          Michael Steidl on what photo metadata standards are at all

-          Sarah Saunders and Abbie Enock on the project of a controlled vocabulary for categorising visual content and a user interface mock up for it

-          Mary Forster (Getty Images) and Andrew LaBonte (Corbis) on the impact of metadata on searching photos

Michael

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Sent by:

Michael Steidl

Managing Director of the IPTC <mdirector@...>

International Press Telecommunications Council - http://www.iptc.org/

Business office address:

20 Garrick Street, London WC2E 9BT, United Kingdom

Registered in England, company no 101096

CEPIC (www.cepic.org ) and the IPTC (www.iptc.org) conducted a survey among image supplier companies about their use of metadata.

The results can be viewed on the Photo Metadata Conference website:

The results from the supplier survey
The results from the client survey

Michael

==================================================

Sent by:

Michael Steidl

Managing Director of the IPTC <mdirector@...>

International Press Telecommunications Council - http://www.iptc.org/

Business office address:

20 Garrick Street, London WC2E 9BT, United Kingdom

Registered in England, company no 101096

In 2008 the IPTC has introduced its newly developed IPTC Extension metadata schema adding more granularity to persons, locations and object in the image plus rights related metadata. First implementations appeared in 2009 and now metadata panels will be available for all Adobe versions from CS3 to CS5:

-          Adobe has added an “IPTC Extension” panel to its CS5 File Info panels which is available for all CS5 products.

-          For CS3 and CS4 a plug-in panel for Bridge will be available on 9 July. This panel is created by IPTC and PLUS and can be downloaded for free.

-          For both panels a detailed user guideline document will be available in July too.

Please check the Photo Metadata section of the IPTC website – www.iptc.org/photometadta - for the released panels and documentation.

Kind regards

Michael

==================================================

Sent by:

Michael Steidl

Managing Director of the IPTC <mdirector@...>

International Press Telecommunications Council - http://www.iptc.org/

Business office address:

20 Garrick Street, London WC2E 9BT, United Kingdom

Registered in England, company no 101096

In mid-July the we announced the release IPTC Extension Panels for CS3 and CS4 on 9 July.

All our contributors have been working hard – and tonight we have decided to move the release to next Thursday.
The panels will be accompanied by a User Guide of some 50 pages (yes in words: fifty) and when it comes to clarifying all the details we want to communicate more time than expected is required.

You will receive a high quality package next week.

Kind regards

Michael

In 2008 the IPTC has introduced its newly developed IPTC Extension metadata schema adding more granularity to persons, locations and object in the image plus rights related metadata. First implementations appeared in 2009 and now metadata panels will be available for all Adobe versions from CS3 to CS5:

-          Adobe has added an “IPTC Extension” panel to its CS5 File Info panels which is available for all CS5 products.

-          For CS3 and CS4 a plug-in panel for Bridge will be available on 9 July. This panel is created by IPTC and PLUS and can be downloaded for free.

-          For both panels a detailed user guideline document will be available in July too.

Please check the Photo Metadata section of the IPTC website – www.iptc.org/photometadta - for the released panels and documentation.

Kind regards

Michael

==================================================

Sent by:

Michael Steidl

Managing Director of the IPTC <mdirector@...>

International Press Telecommunications Council - http://www.iptc.org/

Business office address:

20 Garrick Street, London WC2E 9BT, United Kingdom

Registered in England, company no 101096

Group: I have sent this reply already on Monday, but as was travelling it didn’t make it to this group:

Dear Andrea

I'm not sure if we share the same view of what a registry is:

1) “registry” it is not about EU-funded projects. the IPR-Helpdesk you have addressed is by its definition "Your gateway to IP within EU funded projects " - and their answer addresses IP related to projects - and not to any other content.

2) a registry it has nothing to do with owning content, it is only a repository holding information about content. Apparently the Helpdesk misunderstood this, I quote from their reply "... copyright for which no registration is needed to enjoy the legal protection." To clarify:

the PLUS registry is not intended to be a body at which you can apply for copyright protection, it is simply a web based database of copyright notices ... and a lot more metadata.

Note: I’ve heard back from Andrea that he got aware that the IPR-Helpdesk has a focus on EU-funded projects only and he will check if there are any general regulations regarding registries in Europe.

So let’s see.

Michael

Dear Michael, all,

following our last phone conference last week, I have taken the freedom to contact the European IPR office at the European Commission at http://www.ipr-helpdesk.org regarding my concern about the fact that I did not know if by registring my multimedia content with PLUS organization, I could joy (enjoy), the copyright rights protection over my content NOT only in North America (where PLUS is legally established), but for example also in Italy (or better, in Europe), where my company (Alinari Photo Archive) is located.

Please find below, the feedback from the IPR help desk. I hope this can help a bit to clarify this issue..... Andrea

...............

On the basis of the scenario presented in your query, it is not clear to us what the status of the institution based in the US would be. In this regard, please remember that only the participants (i.e. the signatories of the EU grant agreement) would in principle own project results, including the related IP rights and would have the primary responsibility to protect them when they can be industrially or commercially applied, with registration where appropriate. Moreover, please note that in the case of transfer of ownership to a third party not established in a Member State or country associated to FP7, e.g. the US, including for example, joint ownership arrangements with a such a party (not a beneficiary), the European Commission may object to the intended transfer to preserve European competitiveness and security or ethical principles.

That said, with regard to multimedia contents or pictures, please note that generally speaking this type of results would be protectable by copyright for which no registration is needed to enjoy the legal protection. However, in some countries a ‘record’ can be done, on a voluntary basis, with the view to facilitate the protection in the case of a dispute. For further information on this topic, you may also wish to consult the webpage Innovaccess/Italy/Copyright and/or the FAQs of the US Copyright Office. With or without ‘record’ in a national system, the copyright protection may be enjoyed, from the sole fact of the creation of the work in one country, in all the countries party to the Berne Convention. For instance, a work ‘registered’ in the US may be protected in the Member States of the EU where its right holder seeks protection and would receive the same treatment as if it were a national of these countries. 

Hi Carl

Hm, actually the Erratum on the Errata page was not right: PLUS specifies the Value Type of both the Model Release ID and the Property Release ID as “Bag Text” – see the PLUS specs at http://ns.useplus.org/LDF/ldf-XMPSpecification#ModelReleaseID

So I will correct the Errata page, but the IPTC Photo Metadata Spec document of July 2010 is right.

Michael

==================================================

Sent by:

Michael Steidl

Managing Director of the IPTC <mdirector@...>

International Press Telecommunications Council - http://www.iptc.org/

Business office address:

20 Garrick Street, London WC2E 9BT, United Kingdom

Registered in England, company no 101096

Erratum 2, Issue/XMP "Value Type: Text must be URL"

Thanks Michael, according to our attorneys, given the limited purpose  of the PLUS Registry, and the fact that all aspects of the Registry are 100% voluntary,  and the extent to which we have gone to respect the  IP and privacy laws of all countries, there are no outstanding issues at this time.  Of course, should any specific concern be raised, we will address that concern and revise the functions of the Registry as necessary to respect not only the laws of all countries, but the interests of all stakeholders.

Some additional facts and observations regarding the PLUS Registry:

Voluntary

Registration in the PLUS Registry is not required by PLUS or by the laws of any country. 

Privacy

Those rightsholders desiring to remain anonymous and/or to prevent anyone from finding them simply need not add records to the PLUS Registry.  PLUS itself adds no data to the Registry.  Rightsholders will add whatever metadata is relevant to their needs and desired workflows. The ability for the public to resolve a PLUS-ID so as to view metadata for an image, a license or an entity (company/person) is entirely under the control of the rights holder.  A rightsholder may, for example, designate certain or all metadata as private, viewable only the rightsholder and those parties assigned privileges by the rightsholders. Rightsholders may assign different levels of access to the public and to any parties. The Registry is in part designed to address the very significant business and legal challenges posed by the practice of embedding detailed metadata directly into a file, thus exposing all of that metadata to the public. The exposure of certain metadata to the public may violate privacy laws, and is one of the major challenges inherent in embedded metadata. This aspect is entirely resolved by the PLUS Registry.  Also, while the Registry is designed for broad use in both cultural heritage and business workflows, it is worthwhile to note that exposure of certain  metadata is a very significant concern for many businesses, as such metadata may alert competitors to as-yet unpublished projects/products/services.  This aspect currently discourages the use of embedded photo metadata, and is entirely resolved by the PLUS Registry.

Image Search

Plans for the PLUS Registry do not include queries by keyword, subject matter or other image-content based searches.  The Registry is not to be used for finding images. The Registry is to be used for finding metadata associated with images, licenses and rightsholders.  One would need to be in possession of an image or an image ID in order to find the metadata for that image in the Registry. For example, one would not use the Registry to find images picturing lions. One would first need to be in possession of an particular image of a lion (or the image ID for that image), which may then be used to  query the Registry for metadata made available for that image by the rightsholder.  Of note, if a PLUS License ID is present, the Registry will also provide the rights information associated with license for that particular image file.  This cannot be accomplished by image recognition, as image recognition only identifies an image, not the rights associated with a particular license associated with an image, especially as the same image may be distributed by dozens or even hundreds of licensors.

Image Browsing

There is no browsing of images in the PLUS Registry.  Rightsholders may elect to display image thumbnails within their image metadata records, only for the purpose of allowing visual verification that the metadata record matches the image already in possession of the user. Extreme measures are employed to protect these thumbnails. 

Orphan Works

Although the PLUS Registry was not developed specifically in response to Orphan Works issues, the availability of the Registry will significantly mitigate the Orphan Works challenge by providing a global non-profit resource for identifying and contacting the rightsholders for any image, even where no metadata is present in the image.  The development of regional registries does little to address the orphan works issue, as any image published to the web may be accessed globally, and as the content of an image is not a reliable indicator of the country of origin of the author, and as the public cannot reasonably be expected to search image registries for each of the nearly  200 countries in the world when simply seeking to identify the rightsholder or rights information associated with an image found on the web or elsewhere.  Most importantly, the PLUS Registry will not be a place at which the public may browse through possible orphan works.  Such public posting of orphans creates a shopping center for the theft of free images. PLUS addresses the root of the problem.

Dynamic Metadata

By embedding an ID into the file, and storing detailed metadata in the Registry,  the metadata for any previously distributed file may be updated at any time. This is especially applicable to rights metadata, which is itself dynamic.  This fact , combined with the fragility of embedded metadata and the confidentiality/privacy issues has been a significant deterrent to the use and preservation of image metadata. The PLUS registry addresses these issues as well.

Any and All Applications

The current practice of including  in embedded metadata a link to a rightsholder’s website or  terms and conditions web page, or a paragraph of free text describing rights/usage  is certainly better than nothing, but is of little help to a publisher, designer, ad agency, museum, library or other organization tasked with managing quantities of images. Even small organizations find that they are overwhelmed by  the prospect of effectively managing hundreds of images, and when quantities increase to thousands, tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of images, the tasks becomes nearly impossible, even with a DAM system. The reason: rights metadata are not yet expressed in standardized language, in a standardized, machine interpretable format accessible and readable by any application.  Globally unique persistent image identifiers are not yet in use. The PLUS Registry addresses these issues, allowing any application to access public metadata via an API, and to access private metadata with sufficient permissions.

We are eager to receive comments, suggestions and concerns regarding the PLUS Registry, so that we may improve the design.

Thanks

Jeff Sedlik

PLUS

To all who are editing metadata by using Adobe products:

IPTC and PLUS have released a Photo Metadata Toolkit for Adobe CS3 to CS5 products today, 15 July.

It includes a User Guide for the already built-in IPTC panels of CS5 and adds IPTC Extension and PLUS fields to Adobe Bridge CS3 and CS4 by an easy to use IPTC-PLUS Metadata panel which comes with a comprehensive User Guide too.

Find more about it on the Toolkit web page.

The Toolkit is available for free, download it today.

Any comments are welcome.

Regards,

Michael

==================================================

Sent by:

Michael Steidl

Managing Director of the IPTC <mdirector@...>

International Press Telecommunications Council - http://www.iptc.org/

Business office address:

20 Garrick Street, London WC2E 9BT, United Kingdom

Registered in England, company no 101096

Peter Blaise wrote:

“A shopping center for the theft of free things, eh? Would you kindly explore what your underlying mean here, and possibly try to resolve my confusion over this, my feeling of unresolvable ambiguity between the meanings of the words "theft" and "free" as used here (I'll ignore for now the equally confusing "shopping center" in this context)?”

Hello Peter, I agree, my choice of words was unclear and left much to be explained.

The most recently proposed legislation in the US, which nearly passed,  would have allowed anyone to use any image (whether created years ago or yesterday) for any purpose (commercial or otherwise) without advance payment to the rights holder and without the permission or knowledge of the rightsholder, simply by first searching for, and failing to find, the rightsholder. In the event that the rightsholder would have eventually discovered the use, the rightsholder would have had no right to stop the infringer from continuing to use the image, even if the usage directly competed with the rightsholders attempts to monetize the image, and no matter how objectionable the rightholder might find the usage. The rightsholder would only be entitled to a fee that the infringer agrees is reasonable, and the finding was that a reasonable fee may at time be $0. The bill also sought to remove a rightsholders right to sue for copyright infringement, even for registered works.

Posting possible orphan works to public sites in an attempt to locate the rightsholders is  problematic and not a viable solution to the orphan works problem. Such sites would serve as infringement magnets, as they would essentially be collections of images deemed likely to be of unknown origin (after failed searches), and thus ripe for the picking under orphan works laws, once such laws are passed.  Remember also that as images from any country can be accessed in any other country, and as orphan works laws in any country will result in unauthorized usage of works from all other countries, regional orphan works solutions are unlikely to mitigate the orphan works problem. Also consider that rightsholders cannot possibly dedicate necessary resources to monitor such sites, especially sites containing thousands of images, and where multiple sites in multiple countries must be monitored.

PLUS was not founded to resolve the orphan works challenge, but is expressly focused bringing all stakeholders together to collaborate on standards and tools  connecting creators, rightsholders, images and rights information.  This connection has the very real potential to significantly mitigate orphan works issues, most especially as regards 21^st and 20^th century works. 

The PLUS Coalition is not an advocacy organization and is, by necessity, neutral on the question of orphan works legislation.  My personal position is that orphan works legislation is needed and that fair and reasonable legislation should be passed. I was previously the president of the APA here in the US, and wrote an analysis for the US Senate Committee on the Judiciary, addressing the above issues. If interested, see page 42 and 43 of this 137 page document. http://www.access.gpo.gov/congress/senate/pdf/109hrg/28336.pdf

I hope that this better explains my earlier comments.

Jeff Sedlik

*The most recent version of the US bill allowed any usage of orphan works, excluding only “useful objects” such as buttons, keychains. All other usages of orphan works, such as usage in ad campaigns,  would have been permitted.

The IPTC-PLUS Metadata panel which is included into the IPTC-PLUS Photo Metadata Toolkit for Adobe CS has been updated to version 2 and is available for download:

http://www.iptc.org/cms/site/single.html?channel=CH0099&document=CMS1279131209658

What has been fixed: a couple of PLUS text properties lacked the default language attribute “x-default”

Michael

==================================================

Sent by:

Michael Steidl

Managing Director of the IPTC <mdirector@...>

International Press Telecommunications Council - http://www.iptc.org/

Business office address:

20 Garrick Street, London WC2E 9BT, United Kingdom

Registered in England, company no 101096

As IPTC and EXIF metadata reside side-by-side in the headers of many images you me be interested into this news:

CIPA – the Japanese camera makers – and their standardisation publisher JEITA have released version 2.3 of the EXIF specifications, available in English at:

http://www.cipa.jp/english/hyoujunka/kikaku/pdf/DC-008-2010_E.pdf

From the version history the changes for 2.3:

·         Restructured the main standard text, guidelines, explications etc. of Exif Unified Version 2.21

·         Added and revised tags
(Sensitivity-related Tags, GPS information, camera and lens information, items pertaining to sound files, and light-source colour)

·         Clarified specification level and revised the scope of application

·         Supplemented explanations and adjusted format for the entire text.

Michael

==================================================

Sent by:

Michael Steidl

Managing Director of the IPTC <mdirector@...>

International Press Telecommunications Council - http://www.iptc.org/

Business office address:

20 Garrick Street, London WC2E 9BT, United Kingdom

Registered in England, company no 101096