Pixsy
Delivering Best-of-breed Online Image Protection

Though a game-changer, the internet has not been the kindest medium for publicizing creative content such as photographs and illustrations. Despite having copyrights in place, there is an increase in unauthorized use of these protected images and contents on websites and social media. Daniel Foster, the Co-founder of Pixsy, is all too familiar with this as he has been at the receiving end of unprofessional behavior and a harrowing lawsuit to claim ownership of his photos. This made him realize that there are very few resources to help photographers and artists search for unauthorized use of their content and enforce copyright infringement, especially overseas.

In an interview with CIO Applications, Kain Jones, Pixsy’s CEO, sheds light on how Pixsy’s automated platform finds accurate matches of images on public websites and helps clients take appropriate actions against copyright infringement. “We combine our legal expertise with our AI-driven platform to cater to professional photographers, designers, illustrators, photo agencies, and media and news organizations. We now monitor over 150 million images daily across the public internet and have uncovered more than 350 million matches of our clients’ images.”

Mr. Jones continues, “Images are the visual backbone of the internet, social media, websites and marketing materials. When images are used without permission or a purchased license, this directly affects the ability for these creators to make a living and continue to create new works. Our mission is to simplify the monitoring of images, make legal remedies easily accessible at low cost and low risk, and return a stream of income to creators.”

Please give us a brief overview of Pixsy.

Since 2014, we have grown to be one of the leaders in handling IP copyright matters in relation to images across 22 countries. Our company delivers copyright monitoring and enforcement services to media companies, photo agencies, individual photographers, designers, artists, online shops, and anyone creating 2D designs and illustrations. Pixsy helps clients automatically detect unauthorized use and gives them access to tools and legal resources to protect their content. We have a strong network of local specialist IP/copyright law firms that enables us to resolve and handle copyright infringement claims globally for our clients. Initially, our company started with a private beta offering image detections and license resolutions services in the U.S. alone. As we have expanded our capabilities with newer innovations around a comprehensive suite of tools and services, there has been an increase in the number of clients on our platform, with over 175,000 clients supported today.

Could you elaborate on the platform and the technology it leverages?

Our award-winning software platform fingerprints our clients’ images and combines this with our reverse image search crawling technology to continually monitor the public internet for matches.

This technology enables us to specialize in copyright and IP management around all the uploaded images and designs. Using this, our platform can easily navigate through public websites and identify clients’ images. It can also be employed to index and search marketing materials and additional databases. Once an image gets matched and reported, clients can review the match, and if that image should be removed, issue a DMCA takedown notice. The IP owners can send legally binding takedown notices to any site or host globally with just one click. Our copyright experts create these notices to match local copyright law and are translated into 14 different languages, and cover 35 legal jurisdictions. In addition, our software offers intelligent workflows within clients’ dashboards to monitor the images and takedown and alert them when their content is removed from the concerned website.

If the image is used commercially, by a business, without a license, we work on behalf of our clients to recover compensation and enforce their copyrights. We offer infringing businesses the opportunity to purchase a license for the use or commence legal proceedings in the local jurisdiction of the company. Pixsy partners with over 25 local copyright law firms to handle local legal matters.

To streamline the process of registering images with the U.S. Copyright Office, Pixsy has built a simple workflow and integration to register images at scale.

How does Pixsy scale having such a wide outreach of clients and among increasing innovation?

Our solutions for integrating with copyright offices, scanning through websites, finding matches for clients, and issuing takedown notices are all relatively automated. On the enforcement side, we have our human case management team and local legal partners handle all matters, with some support from document and process automation when needed. Our case managers review every case individually and ensure it a valid copyright infringement claim and that it meets high-quality standards, as expected by clients. With our technology, automation, and support, we can provide efficiency in monitoring and resolving copyright infringement on a global scale.

Can you cite a few customer success stories to substantiate the company’s success?

We have thousands of success stories; in one notable instance, we had collaborated with a photographer whose image was used worldwide by Netflix for the show “The Stranger Things,” without his consent. In spite of trying to resolve this issue, the company did not comply with his request to resolve the issue directly. As such, using our extensive legal expertise, we sued Netflix on his behalf and were successful in settling the case and recovering compensation. We have taken on major corporations across the globe and recovered compensation for our clients.

Secondly, from a media and photo agency perspective, we help ensure that content is displayed in the right places and that license agreements have been respected. When they are not, we are able to issue claims and recover compensation for our clients.
Finally, we have helped business clients with counterfeit protection, removals, and litigation. Our web-shop and e-commerce clients often sell their products with particular product photography in marketing materials that competitors or counterfeiters use. We help them get their products removed and delisted from unauthorized listings while also issuing infringement cases on their behalf to secure compensation and or damages.

How is Pixsy steering ahead in the future?

We are very focused on expanding our tools and services for our global clients in the ever-changing internet landscape. As the volume of images used online is astronomical, reaching up to 10 trillion, we aim at improving our platform tools and global enforcement services to become an end-to-end rights management platform for images. We currently integrate with 14 platforms, including Instagram, Flickr, SmugMug, Tumblr, Google Drive, Google Photos, among others. With our powerful software and legal expertise, we are giving control back in the hands of our clients on how to monitor and protect their creative content.