It’s almost impossible to protect copyrighted work these days; it’s too easy for people to copy what you produced and you don’t have time to go after everyone who violates your copyright. Yes, we live in a world of copycats, content thieves, and copyright violators. It seems to be human nature, and no matter how hard we try, we can’t get over this, and we certainly can’t do it online or in the digital age. Yes, those with intellectual property are doing their best to pressure Congress to make new laws, but those who would violate those laws always seem to find a way around them.

Interestingly, despite all this content theft, on August 16, 2012 a very interesting article appeared in the Wall Street Journal titled; Sheron Terlep and Ryan Dezember’s “Carlyle Group Establishes a Deal to Buy Getty Images”, which made me consider that there will be future cyber laws looming. Based on this, and realizing the lobbying power of the Carlyle Group, I suppose they have figured out a way to protect themselves from people stealing their content, so I anticipate a future cyber law that will be enacted soon.

Was it a good purchase and a wise choice? Well, it quite possibly could be if much of the internet in the United States ends up in the cloud, and those with copyrights can demand that the cloud run search algorithms to find stolen intellectual property and charge a fine or fee. by using that property, or cutting off services for the individual or company that violates copyright. Which means that the company could lose all their data and be banned from access until they pay. That’s one possibility, I’m sure you can think of others.

When it comes to digital images online, they are often encoded as a watermark with a specific code, anyone who copies the image also copies the code and therefore they are automatically captured every time someone searches for that code. This is good for digital photographers, artists, and digital content owners. Remember that Getty Images has an inventory like no other, and in the new next-generation scheme of things there may be far fewer copyright violations, and those who violate the rules will have to pay.

This will keep others from violating those rules, meaning more people will have to buy the images they use, and that would include everyone from the mainstream media to the humble blogger. In fact, I hope you will please consider all of this and think about it.