Firstlight.ca – commercial “royalty free/rights managed images and footage” repository

http://www.firstlight.ca/

Sent to me by a colleague as a “Canadian example of digital rights managment for digital media,” (thanks Brian!), this is worth pondering for those in the repository building business.

The site uses a lot of Javascript, frames and flash which makes it a real pain to try and point out specific aspects to you as it mostly returns under the single URL, but if you go to the pricing info page you can launch a Flash-based “Rights Managed Pricing Calculator” which is worth looking at (if only for a bit of sticker shock at how much images cost to license). The browseable taxonomy terms and how the searching works (clearly using some thesaurus) is also worth a glance.

Yeah, yeah, I know, all content should be free/it’s the networks, not the closed silos/the revolution will be blogged/yada yada yada. For the rest of us, here’s simply an actual real world commercial example to chew on. – SWL