Industry Facts

Overview
Delivering and tracking content on the internet is a major issue in the digital media industry today. Collectively, the numbers of digital objects being generated each year are estimated at 1 trillion worldwide. Within the music, entertainment, print publishing, software and stock image markets the value of this content is over $500 billion and is estimated to grow to over $700 billion in the next 3 years. Along with this dramatic growth is the increased need for content owners, distributors and consumers of digital objects to understand how their content is being used on the internet.
Trends
While the awareness has been raised it remains extremely difficult for content owners to enforce copyrights and license rights. It is the tremendous success of the internet that is driving the growing use of and misuse of intellectual property and copyrighted material. Underlying this increase in internet use are the following trends:
The ever increasing bandwidth that allows for the near frictionless delivery of music, image, digital text and more recently digital video
Improvements in the ability to monetize digital intellectual property such as digital images, music, text, and video
The lack of identification, tracking, and business intelligence systems for these digital objects
A myriad of non-interoperable digital rights management schemes and systems
Pushback by consumers of digital rights management systems Recent DevelopmentsRecent developments reveal that owners, distributors and consumers are becoming increasing concerned about the lack of being able to track or identify their content as well as the mechanisms to identify and protect it:
Viacom Sues Google, YouTube for $1B over copyright infringement – USA Today, March 2007
Threat for Big Media: Guerilla Video Sites – Wall Street Journal, April 2007
ITunes and Music – DRM does not work – Steve Jobs – Thoughts on Music, February 2007
Corbis sues Templatemonster for $109M over copyright infringement of images – Reuters News, July 2006
Rep. Lamar Smith and Sen. Orrin Hatch introduce the “Orphan Works Act of 2006” (H.R. 5439), which creates new guidelines for use of copyrighted material when the original owner cannot be located – Washington Post May, 2006
Pirates Foil Hollywood's High-Tech Security – Wall Street Journal, October 2007
As a result, the industry is losing upwards of $11B in lost revenue in 2006 and predicted to grow to beyond $140 billion over the next 8 years
According to the MPAA over $7B in revenue due to illegal piracy of videos content.
The RIAA reports that the trade of pirate music content was worth $4.5 billion globally in 2006
Infoflows Fedmark Platform
It is against this backdrop that Infoflows introduces the Fedmarksm Platform and the Fedmark Image and Video Solutions. The Fedmarksm Platform is focused on an innovative approach to tracking, monitoring, legal control and recovery of online assets by content owners. Supported by an easily managed user interface, the most powerful internet crawl technology available, and a dynamic visual search capability, Infoflows believes that Fedmark will become the standard for intellectual property protection for all forms of digital objects – be they stock images, video clips, audio files, or software applications.