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Photo Software - Monday, September 22, 2008

Israel's Picapp Raises $3.2M For Ad Supported Photo Rights

Some photo rights outfit recently got in touch to ask if we had the rights to some photos that we had grabbed from some startups' sites. The truth is that the vast majority of bloggers have no compelling reason to pay for access to photos. We really don't know if the photo rights goons are going to be coming after us all or not but at least one startup believes that they will.

Thinking about this some more, we do know that some large gossip sites like Perez Hilton have been sued for their illegal use of photos grabbed from agency sites. And we have been reading about the raging popularity of gossip sites and their proliferation. A recent report found that 38% of young adults ages 18-24 use these gossip sites. If the photo owners keep suing this crew we can imaging they will turn to rights, if important pictures are indeed available.

Israel's Picapp was founded earlier this year to offer sites and bloggers legal use of its database of 10M images for free in exchange for allowing advertisements on their sites. Each image downloaded from the database has an advertisement attached, which appears on the website together with the image. PicApp's database has images from picture and new agencies, including Image Source, Corbis, Getty Images, and Splash News.

The news here is of course that PicApp Technologies has raised funding - in fact $3.2M from Carmel Ventures and angel Leon Recanati.

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