A Question from a Visitor:
Is there software available that can track and "obliterate" or watermark an image once the usage rights has expired on that image?
If so, I would imagine it depends on where that image "lives" once it has been distributed.
Does something like this exist?
There are a variety of solutions around watermarking and expiration of images. Considering my role in Product Management at ClearStory, I will answer in regards to our DAM solution, ActiveMedia. I invite all viewer's to post and provide additional stories.
ActiveMedia provides the following related capabilities:
1) Image ingestion with assigned metadata, including (but not limited to) Expiration as a date field
2) Saved Search (for users and for automated worklfows) that identify assets that are reaching or reached their expiration date
3) Automated Workflow (system) tasks that can manipulate the asset to reflect a variety of expiration rules: a) change permissions to the asset to prevent future download of the expired asset; b) create rendition which could apply a watermark (although watermarking is a custom option for us) to the thumbnail plus any/all renditions of the asset; c) change metadata values to reflect the change in status (ie: distribution = private); and d) move the asset to a secure collection in the repository.
4) Project-based workflow that would automatically 'Search' for the expired assets daily and perform the series of automated tasks required to effect the state of an expired asset (any or all of a,b,c,d above).
You might be asking yourself 'why don't you just delete it?'. The answer involves the fact that deleting an asset also deletes the history, versions, etc. We felt this was too dramatic for an automatic action. You can manually search for expired assets (or view them in the archive location) and then delete them accordingly. We felt the user intervention would be preferred.
Finally, to speak to your final comment regarding 'where it lives once distributed'. You are correct. We (and I suspect others) have not (yet) solved the problem of expiring assets that have been distributed outside the application (e.g. downloaded or delivered). We are working on future capabilities where the 'tracked' asset, upon expiration, notifies all known users that the asset is expired. However, we are not looking to 'spam' users and right now (in a typical large scale repository) would be the likely result.
Thanks for asking!! LMK if you have further or follow on questions
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