Case Study
Case Study Street Map Publisher
How the PIXRAY Seeker™ helps a Street Map Publisher to enforce his Licensing Strategy
Only one map had to be sampled for typical features
Street Map Publishers face one major challenge: many web site operators use their maps without licensing them appropriately. Street Maps are the type of image content that is most often used without permission on the web. This heavily compromises publishers’ businesses. When a well-known German Street Map Publisher contacted PIXRAY he was at a point where his traditional approaches for detecting licensing infringements on the web reached their limits. So far a monitoring team manually browsed the web for map usages using typical search terms like “street map” or “how to find us” on standard search engines. This, however, led to a number of restrictions: First of all, although Google claims to find more than 50 million pages for the search term “street map” alone, it will only display the first 1.000 results, therefore not providing access to the largest share of pages found. Second, the pages found this way will usually include a street map – but it is very likely that it belongs to a different publisher. Third, street maps that are used on a page that does not contain a typical search term, will not be found this way. In the beginning of 2011 the Street Map Publisher started to use the PIXRAY Seeker™ to track the use of his data on the web. The PIXRAY team worked with the publisher to take a representative sample of the map data to train the PIXRAY Seeker™. Despite the very large amount of image data contained in the publisher’s pool, only one map of a typical inner city area and one typical rural area had to be sampled for this purpose. Due to this fact the sampling process only took a small amount of time. Together with the client the PIXRAY team decided where on the web and how deeply the search shall be performed in the following months. The customer decided to search all 16.7 Mio. web sites in the .de/.at/.ch top-level domains and analyse each site to a link-depth of three clicks from the home page.
Most maps are not traceable in common search engines
By using the PIXRAY seeker™ the client had reached three goals at a time:
- to find virtually all occurrences of its maps on the German-speaking web
- to reduce the man power needed to search for copyright infringements
- to reduce the time lag between the illicit publishing of a map and legal actions
Without having to touch its own technical infrastructure and without any notable efforts on its side, the Street Map Publisher has found a way to boost its efficiency in enforcing its licensing strategy. In the first half year after introducing the PIXRAY Seeker™ our client was able to recover otherwise lost licensing fees in the order of 30.000,- Euros, thus amortising the monthly invest in running the PIXRAY Seeker™ many times. “The PIXRAY Seeker™ helps us to keep an eye on the use of our street maps on the web. For the first time we are able to systematically scan all of the web pages in a timely manner, therefore reducing both our human labour costs and the delay before we can react to any given licensing infringement”, says the Managing Director of the Street Map Publisher.
