2011 Articles

Photographers and Collective Licensing: A Short History with No Ending

Mopsik, Eugene

In the early 1990s, the American Society of Media Photographers ("ASMP") explored the possibility of a collective licensing solution to help manage the myriad uses of photography that were being created by a new means of digital distribution: the Internet. The entity was called the Media Photographers Copyright Agency ("MPCA"). Photographers were not ready for it, stock agencies were afraid of it and funding was scarce. It failed.