New Tool Watches for Image and Logo Misuse: Protects Copyrights and Trademarks Online

Over the next few weeks UsefulArts.US will be featuring some exciting new tools you can use to protect your online intellectual property.  Anyone can describe the online risks to copyright and trademark holders, but if you read these posts you’ll find some exciting new ways to protect your assets, often with free services.

Searching and Policing Image Use Online
One of those exciting new (and free while in beta) services is TinEye, a reverse image search engine. You can submit an image to TinEye to find out where it came from, how it is being used, if modified versions of the image exist, or to find higher resolution versions. The image might be resized, cropped, warped, or manipulated with Photoshop, but TinEye’s algorithm searches for all Web pages that use a derivative of the same original image.

It Really Works – And It’s Really Free
To date, TinEye has indexed 1,013,140,121 images from the web. I tried the program out by entering a photograph of myself, and sure enough, it found my image on websites talking about me. The demo below shows that you can easily click through to websites using images.

Policing Use of Your Art or Service Marks Online
TinEye was developed by Toronto-based Idée, which expects to introduce a paid feature which will allow visitors to upload or point to a group of images, and have TinEye check for matches on a regular basis, sending subscribers “watch notices” when matches are found.

Leila Boujnane, CEO of Idée, says that TinEye isn’t exclusively for policing commercial images. She suggests that visual artists releasing work under a Creative Commons license might use TinEye to make sure that any attribution requirement, for example, is observed.

Being hip to viral marketing, they’ve made it easy to embed their demo, which you can try below, or visit at: http://tineye.com/widgets/display.

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