March 14th, 2007 by Lloyd Gofton
With the inevitable lawsuit against YouTube taking centre stage, and CeBIT, the world’s biggest technology show, about to open its doors tomorrow, I almost missed the news that Scoopt has been acquired by Getty images.
Scoopt is a citizen journalism photo aggregator and distributor, founded by Scottish journalist Kyle MacRae and his wife in 2005.
It has been a key source of user-generated editorial content, focused on photographs and videos captured by eyewitnesses who have observed headline-making moments.
Scoopt members text or email still images and video to the agency so it can sell images on their behalf to the international press.
Photographers who submit imagery to Scoopt retain copyright but grant the agency a 12-month exclusive license that authorises re-license to one or more publishers.
A lesson YouTube may have to learn the hard way.
According to Journalism.co.uk Getty plans to fully integrate Scoopt into its organisation and to distribute images captured by non-professionals alongside its current supply of pictures.
So congratulations to the MacRaes who were one of the pioneers of photo-based UGC and have got their just rewards.
