A proposal for the avoidance of orphan works

[Graham Mitchell]

Perhaps this will stir up some interesting ideas and discussion:
http://www.graham-mitchell.com/blog/?p=221

[feppe]

Perhaps this will stir up some interesting ideas and discussion:
http://www.graham-mitchell.com/blog/?p=221

Your proposal sounds like an extension of what TinEye already does. Financing the building, hosting and bandwidth for such a gargantuan database is a non-trivial task, though, and probably the biggest obstacle. Also, authenticating the original submitter of each and every photo is actually the copyright holder will get complicated (read: expensive), especially in a global legal sphere.

Moore's Law might make the technical side financially feasible in the foreseeable future, depending on how the service would get financed (ads, contributions, submission/usage fees, etc.).

[Graham Mitchell]

Actually it seems that a similar proposal has already been made and taken much further:
http://www.stop43.org.uk/new_thinking/new_thinking/national_cultural_archive.html

[Graham Mitchell]

Your proposal sounds like an extension of what TinEye already does. Financing the building, hosting and bandwidth for such a gargantuan database is a non-trivial task,

It's big, but not beyond what already exists. There are already databases in the petabytes region. 1 petabyte can hold 10 billion 100kB images.

Also, authenticating the original submitter of each and every photo is actually the copyright holder will get complicated (read: expensive), especially in a global legal sphere.

Again I don't see this as an issue. A pro photographer will tend to have the raw file, and other shots from the session which were never published, not to mention they can usually prove they were at the location, they can name the location, they can name the models, etc How often do you hear of anyone pretending to be the photographer of an image and selling usage of it? I've never heard of it happening. By making false submissions a statutory offence, people are very unlikely to bother.

[feppe]

It's big, but not beyond what already exists. There are already databases in the petabytes region. 1 petabyte can hold 10 billion 100kB images.

The point was not that it can't be done; it certainly can and Google and MS already have such gargantuan databases. But Flickr alone has over 5 billion images. My point was that it's very expensive to setup and maintain. I'm talking Fortune 50 company resources here. Datacenter with "just" 1 petabyte costs in the millions in storage hardware alone - add to that setup, software development, maintenance, cooling, security, electricity, etc.

Not sure how TinEye works, but there's certainly a lot of raw CPU power at their datacenters to do the pattern matching on all those images since they don't do bit-by-bit matching - again adding to the cost. We're talking a big warehouse full of cutting edge hardware and software ran by an army of specialized engineers.

If there's no money in running such a database to turn a profit, nobody will do it. Public money is probably not an option, either, given the state of the world economy and cost.

[Graham Mitchell]

If there's no money in running such a database to turn a profit, nobody will do it. Public money is probably not an option, either, given the state of the world economy and cost.

It's a rather inexpensive project as public projects go. Anyway, we'll see. Photographers are not normally good at organizing themselves and lobbying.