PLUS—Picture Licensing Universal System

At a CAPIC event last held night in CBC’s Glenn Gould Auditorium (and webcast across the country to CAPIC meetings and individuals), Jeff Sedlik was in TO to deliver to a nearly full house the most amazing news of the efforts of PLUS, the system he and his cross-industry cronies have been building the past decade for standardizing rights language and image licensing. The idea is to make it a no-brainer through technology so that all rights language and image licensing becomes as standard as IPTC meta data and systems like Panatone colours. It leaves one very hopeful, if also a bit skeptical about the rate of compliance and implementation that may occur, and of course presumes good will and integrity on the part of buyers which we know is far from the truth in many cases…but the ideas and method seem very solid.

According to PLUS’s website news, here are just three key items pulled from many:
IPTC Integrates PLUS Standards. The Board of Directors of the IPTC voted to approve a revision to the IPTC Photo Metadata Standard, incorporating a significant number of rights-related fields established in the PLUS Standards.

Adobe Announces CS4. PLUS Leadership Circle member Adobe Systems has announced Adobe® Photoshop® CS4 and Photoshop CS4 Extended. Look for PLUS “File Info” panels in an update to CS4.

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 PLUS Plug-in Beta. Developer Timothy Armes begins beta testing of a plug-in that allows users of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 to embed PLUS metadata in image files.