This is Ophir from GumGum. Thank you for the comments and interest. I’d like to speak to a few issues:

1) Re: Piracy – We do not claim, nor is it our intention, to stop content piracy on the Internet. We know, as well as anyone, that this is an impossibility. We have implemented several anti-piracy measures such as replacing a right-click ‘Save-As’ with a ‘License Me’ option, keeping content out of the cache, preventing hotlinking etc., but obviously a screen capture will work (though screen capturing and cropping is hardly easy to automate and is a headache in any case).

Our focus is as a distribution and monetization platform for *legitimate* content licensing. We believe our model simply makes the most sense for the Internet. We believe that GumGum will curb piracy by making it so easy, frictionless and affordable (ie: eliminating capital intensive barriers to entry) to license media that publishers no longer have much incentive to pirate media (ie: what iTunes did for music). In the end, piracy will continue as will legitimate licensing practices. We intend to be the platform to deliver and monetize legitimate licenses.

2) Re: Flash – Flash lends itself to a lot of flexibility. Most importantly, it gives us the ability to display interactive advertisements overlaid on top of media. This licensing option enables publishers to license content for free while compensating content-owners handsomely. Beyond this, we are able to do dynamic watermarking and seamlessly add other useful features moving forward. Lastly, the platform is in the process of being extended to video and audio (which would be in a flash embed regardless).

Sorry about the performance issues when the post first went up. That has been tended to.

I invite you to visit our blog at http://blog.gumgum.com for more information and to remain up to date.

Check out this post specifically to get a better sense of how we think about the problem and our solution: http://blog.gum...ew-on-this.html

Thanks!

Ophir

Das Fotografie-Blog berichtet von einem “revolutionären Honorarmodell für Online-Fotos”, umgesetzt von der US-amerikanischen Agentur gumgum. Das macht neugierig.

Worin besteht nun das revolutionäre Honorarmodell? Zunächst einmal darin, dass ve…

I don’t get it how flash can prevent from stealing the image? do you think people don’t know how to make a screenshot? If someone wants to steal the image then flash won’t help. still think that without flash this service could be more successfull.

Those wanting to steal photos should realize that the photographers look at websites all the time and using gumgum, it should be obvious that the image is being used illegally. I know photographers who make more money from those that steal their work than they do from selling their images.

If I’m going to use this in my blog, I would definitely go with whoever can provide the best, broader professional content. Given the current relationships with the major players like Corbis, the picapp product is going to be really hard to beat.

http://www.stoc...s-picscout.html

I found your entry interesting do I’ve added a Trackback to it on my weblog …

GumGum Launches New Image Licensing Platform: GumGum co-founder Ari Mir introduces his new company and submitted a GumGum fact sheet…

2) would never want to rely on your servers to serve photos, unless you add significant band with you will slow down many sites — Would I have to pay for impression when you are slowing down my site.

3) CPM is way expensive for a site that uses photos in every post, way to hard to manage and leave the possibility that the content “owner” will revoke the license and I’ll have a big broken image or no image on the post. This happens multiple times and shit — what a headache

I’ll stick with the flat licensing fee that way I can host everything and not worry

Their site went live yesterday. How did your site (shutterpoint.com, a competing photo licensing platform) do in it’s first 24 hours during a TechCrunch post? Ah.. maybe you haven’t had that ‘great’ problem yet. Look, we’d all like to get a mention on here.. but it’s no reason to pretend like an objective and interested reader just so you can throw a cheap jab at a competing biz model. Hate the game not the player.

Can we have some comments about news about startups that actually make some sense?

Can we have some news about startups that actually make some sense.