Let there be light

We will monitor and control 10+ million images for photo and video community Lobster across the web

Let’s be honest: Most photographers and the average social media user have no idea how and where their photos are being used on the web. Heck, at the moment even most people on our team don’t know where some of their pictures end up.

As we are building the KODAKOne platform, we have two key scenarios in mind right now (with many more in between):

Professional and semi-professional artists are uploading their work on different websites to make money and don’t want anyone else using their work without compensation. Your everyday mom/dad/uncle/grandma/kid/teen is sharing their personal images and videos on social media and there needs to be someone to make sure, that their files don’t end up at some dubious and shady places.

That’s what our platform will do. We will help all of them to take back control of their work and personal files.

Enter Lobster: billions of opportunities

Lobster is a partner that fits perfectly into the first scenario.

Lobster is a platform that helps photographers and social media users to easily upload and monetize their photos and videos. The platform licenses photos and videos from Instagram, Facebook, Flickr, Vimeo, YouTube, Dropbox, Google Photos, Verizon Cloud, VKontakte (VK) and Foursquare.

The company uses AI and Machine Learning to apply sophisticated tagging, filtering, ranking and curation to their database. 10+ million images and videos are directly available, while Lobster has access to billions more upon request. In short: Their library can only be described as massive in size with millions of high-quality shots. It’s no surprise that its used by many of the biggest brands on the planet.

In a first pilot, we have monitored the use of 10.000 images from their library across the web for two weeks and we found a number of hits on average for each image.

We asked CEO Olga Egorsheva what got her excited about our partnership and this is what she replied:

We are super excited to join forces with the team behind KODAKOne in identifying Instagram, Facebook and other social media content uses without permission, providing this info to our users and empowering them to offer post-licensing to the (often unintentional) copyright infringers in a positive way.

The letter by Sergey Prahov

To pull this off, we are combining three key services that are part of the overall KODAKOne platform: our image recognition algorithm that is capable of analyzing billions of images in a short amount of time, a network of web crawlers that monitors the web, and a post-licensing service that helps people to get compensated for their images that have already been used without their consent, or that helps them to take those images them down.

And according to Rebecca Warger, Community Growth Manager at Lobster, users love it:

From early testing, we had a great response from our community. Users both thanked us for considering their privacy and control over the content they make available digitally, and turned to us as a trusted resource in supporting them to find a solution to the misuse of their content in the given examples.

One system to protect them all

Our algorithms are able to process large amounts (read: billions) of images in the fraction of a second. It’s really amazing what’s happening in the background and we will share more technical details about this in an upcoming blog post.

For us, the launch of our partnership with Lobster is a perfect use case for our mission: Giving photographers, artists and the average smartphone user full control of how their images are being used across the web. (Video support is already in the works and will be added later.)

In a next step we will register all images from their library on our blockchain. Once this is done, Lobster will be able to offer monitoring and post-licensing to all their users. If you want to test the system yourself, head over to Lobster.Media and get to work. You will see our service popping up in the near future.

And now we are getting back to work to make this happen!