PLUS
As reported in PDNonline, a worldwide coalition of organisations have joined a non-profit initiative to clearly define and standardise aspects of image licensing and management. The Picture Licensing Universal System (PLUS) is intended to become a system of codes that will define all the possible different type of image licensing options and assign numbers to them. The type of information that would normally be written in a contract, or added as usage restrictions in a caption, can then be described precisely in a numeric code they call the “Media Matrix”. Currently they have a glossary of over 1300 licensing terms and in time they hope to enable photographers to embed this Media Matrix directly into the image metadata so that it travels with the image and can be recognised at every stage of the distribution process. With the likes of Adobe, Getty Images, the National Press Photographers Association (NPPA), and Editorial Photographers (EP) amongst others as backers it seems like the project has quite some potential.
