Four Screens Media

One of the problems with rights management on the web is that much of the web is about discovery.  The challenge is how to allow users to discover, and then use what they’ve discovered. 

On approach can be fond with Picscout, a company trying to solve the discovery and rights management challenge for images.  They just launched a tool that allows someone (like a yours-truly blogger…) to conduct a transaction with an image owner regardless of where they found an images.  As someone who has often found great images for posts and presentations, but on sites that had no link to the owner, this solves a frustrating problem.

Can this really solve a problem.  Probably.  Ideally, a solution like Picscout becomes industry standard (for images, video, sound etc) so that when you discover something anywhere, you can easily acquire the rights. 

There is a free beta now at http://imagex.picscout.com and an impressive list (maybe they are on the way to becoming a standard) of industry participants here: http://www.picscout.com/news-and-events/industry-wide-support.html