Review of Pixsy copyright enforcement

Finding your images

Once we let our creations loose onto the wilds of the internet there is no telling where they will roam and who will entice them onto their domain. Keeping track of our images is an almost impossible task. The likes of Google image search and Tineye are fine for the occasional search but hardly solves the overall problem. However a relatively new company by the name of Pixsy aims to help address the problem somewhat. I believe they have been somewhat surprised by the interest in there service as I had to wait a few months whilst they upgraded before they sent through my invitation to join .


https://www.pixsy.com/

 

So how does it work? Once you set up your account, you supply it with a list of URLs where your images are stored. This can be places such as your web site, Flickr, 500px accounts etc. It will then go and catalogue all the images it finds at those sites and once done off it goes searching the internet for copies. Up to 5000 pictures can be catalogued with their free subscription, with an unlimited number and extra features available with a paid one. Searches are regularly repeated and at any time you can log on and see the results.
But it goes further! Upon reviewing the results, should you find a copyright infringement you wish to take action against, you can forward it to their compensation team who will then contact the image user and hopefully negotiate a usage fee from them. For this they charge 50% of any recovered fee , which might seem a lot, but then 50% of something is a lot better than 100% of nothing!
So does it work? Well I set up my account and supplied my URLs and within a short amount of time it had catalogued my images and started finding copies of them! After a week or so I returned to view a more substantial report. As with any system like this there are always going to be some finds that are of a similar picture, but surprisingly few in this case. Other copies were legitimate posts I, a model or client had made and you can tell it to ignore these. Should a website, or one of your images, keep coming up with false finds, these can be ignored as well. However after reviewing the findings there were a surprising number of unsanctioned uses, from personal posts, to more commercial usages (for example a number of my images are being used on an Italian medical website)!
It's unfortunate that as I look through various web sites, groups etc, I sometimes find unscrupulous people passing off others work or stock images as their own. Hopefully with the likes of Pixsy this will become harder to do, as they find "You can't hide!".



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