From LawSites:
ImageRights International, a company whose technology has helped visual artists protect their copyrights since 2009, is now entering the legal tech market with its launch today of ImageRights for Law Firms, a platform designed to help law firms and corporate legal departments directly protect their clients’ copyrighted photographs, illustrations, digital art and other visual works.
ImageRights for Law Firms uses proprietary, cloud-based technology to constantly search the internet for uses of clients’ images and to automatically acquire evidence for firms to use in pursuing legal remedies.
The powerful technology will find images matching the clients’ even if they have been radically cropped, had colors changed or removed, been altered with text or image overlays, or have been flipped or added to a collage, the company says.
. . . .
While the platform cannot distinguish between authorized and unauthorized uses of an image, it constantly monitors the internet and then collects any copies it finds in a review platform, where the company’s AI sorts, filters and ranks the images so that the the client or attorney can review them and identify any that are not authorized.
The attorney can then request a time- and date-stamped screenshot, which the product collects and saves, along with server IP information.
From there, the attorney can download the images with the click of a button, to be used directly or imported into a case management system.
The new law firm platform uses the same AI search technology that has been the core of ImageRights’ product for visual artists since 2009. As part of its service for artists, the company maintains an international network of attorneys that artists can connect with to protect their copyrights.
Link to the rest at LawSites
One wonders whether the estate of Prince Rogers Nelson is snickering at this… because an AI-based engine focused on music (not images — and computationally, music is harder), well over a decade ago, led to the dancing-baby case.
With lots of billable hours. But only in litigation, because there wasn’t any in-house counsel in the relevant department — it had been delegated to barely-trained interns and inexperienced paralegals to determine “fair use,” with rather draconian HR-approved performance-report penalties for kicking things upstairs too often.
And, eventually, shame and embarassment for the client base meaning those billable hours are no more.
“the company’s AI sorts, filters and ranks the images so that the the client or attorney can review them and identify any that are not authorized.”
An exciting new world of billable hours!
There is that.