So you say you want a revolution…

In the last few weeks, a very new, but long-discussed strategy to affect Rights Managed Licensing has finally been enabled by placing it’s first legs on the ground. In an attempt to answer the market-driven “easy” solution offered by Royalty Free licensing, the PLUS group has come up with “Plus Packs“. These are designed to make the process of purchasing managed rights easy, both for buying and tracking. Oh here, let them tell you:

“PLUS Packs introduce a universal licensing standard for a streamlined form of image licensing. With licensors of all sizes worldwide offering the same conveniently standardized, numbered packages, Rights Managed image licensing will be easier than ever.”

See the Standards Library and Media Matrix at http://www.useplus.com

A recent discussion on a pro forum had one photographer commenting on the early demise of the PLUS System within two weeks of the announced availability, because he basically hadn’t yet seen anything sweep into action. It was a sort-of, “Where’s all the hype? Where’s all the media? Where’s all the photographers clambering aboard?.” Quick to answer the call in the vein of “My early death has been misreported and greatly exaggerated”, one spokesperson basically said, “Hey, give us a break; it’s only been two weeks”.

While I chuckled from the sidelines during this exchange, it did get me to thinking that we could be seeing the start of a quiet revolution. Between the Plus Packs and Getty’s Rights-Ready Licensing model, maybe Rights Managed photographers will have a chance to stay in the Buyers game of “Simple & Easy”. But this revolution won’t happen with hordes of photographers flipping a switch on March-sumteenth, and all of the sudden everyone will be Plus-Packing their images to market. Rather this will be a revolution of conversion, one photographer, and one buyer at a time.

For myself, I’d very much like to enable a simplified licensing and sales model ASAP. That model should give the buyers more of what they want, namely ease and flexibility; yet still let me retain full control over the use of my images. More importantly, I want to maintain a sense of value based on use. Call me old-fashioned or just plain dense as a frozen potato(e), but an image used in a full page national print ad campaign shouldn’t have the same dollar value as a much smaller local use like a direct mail postcard. Getty’s Rights-Ready model comes close to a balance between royalty-free-based-on-use, but the 10-year license for a still fairly low price was pretty ridiculous.

Somewhere between Royalty Free, Rights Managed, Rights-Ready, and PLUS Packs should lie our balanced pathway, and a revolutionary model for simplifying the licensing of our intellectual property. I’ve always though the concept should be called something easy, like, “TERM-LIMITED RIGHTS (TLR)” licensing.  (Come on now, “Rights Ready”? What kind of name is that anyway, and what the heck does it mean? Whereas with TERM-LIMITED RIGHTS (TLR); it’s pretty obvious what that name means, huh? )

TLR Licensing should be as simple as checking out a library book, with simple tracking and renewal options. It should offer the buyer unlimited use within a ‘value-considered’ “Use & Media” (the PLUS Pack), and have the variable term like 1, 2, 3, 5, or 10 years. After all, from a buyer’s perspective, you can and should be able to read a book as much as you want while you have it checked out. Technology these days should also make it easy and simple to send out annual automated renewal notices, and where a simple click of a mouse and a credit card number should be all that’s required to renew a license.

Thanks to the combined movements of the PLUS Coalition, the introduction of Getty’s Rights-Ready model, and the market demand for Easy, I have to wonder, how close are we to seeing an actual revolution like we saw with the advent or Royalty Free and now again with Microstock? How close to the end of the Yellow Brick Road are we? Are we all just gonna sit around and wait for someone else to make the first mover or fire the first shot?  Wait – what was that? A gunshot? No. Perhaps it was the sound of a car backfiring? No. Maybe it was the sound of a media matrix database being downloaded?

For the moment, the PLUS Standards bring us Rights-Managed licensors closer than ever to the goal of being “easy”. But in my humble opinion, this revolution can’t get off the ground with shaky legs.

I’ve finally had my chance to download and look at the Plus Packs, and the USEPLUS.com site matrix coder and decoder, and that’s all well & good for establishing and tracking types of uses. But we need something simple for the selling side, not just at an agency level, but at the grass roots as well. The established business photographers currently making direct stock sales, and newbies climbing out of the ranks of microstocks, flckr, and the Creative Commons envrionments need a place where they can learn about and compare all licensing models. As it stands now, we all seem to stumble blindly down a dark alley, gathering bits of information from here and there. Let the USEPLUS.com site become that one center for “Licensing Education”.

Personally, I think the next step in this revolution, now that the matrices are in place, is not just to build one place where everyone can go. Rather, also build an interface that can be anywhere and everywhere the buyers go, just like many of the Agency online calculators and the PLUS Matrix coder / decoder. I’d like to see PLUS Coalition build a cohesive and unified html interface that photographers can download, use and modify so they can understand this matrix, establish pricing, and then implement it directly into their own web sites. Soon, Buyers everywhere will come to recognize and understand how easy it is to get Term-Limited Rights, whether through an agency or directly from a photographer. And maybe many photographers who have gone over to, or have only ever licensed RF, will see that they can still get more value for their images based on the type and length of use. Let the photographers set their own dollar values and modify percentages as they see fit, based on what they think the value for each “Media & Use” pack and term should be. After all, nobody wants the ugly specter of price fixing to raise its head.

The PLUS Coalition has positioned themselves to take the lead in this revolution; and I hope they do so waving banners high and wide. Let the new Plus Packs matrix and interface become globally and readily accessible, available, affordable, understandable, and most importantly, implement-able by us, the every-man. Then we’ll be talking about something truly revolution-able. (Speaking of which, have you seen that new I-phone thingy?)