Corbis
| Corbis Corporation
|
|
|---|---|
 |
|
| legal form | Corporation |
| founding | 1989 |
| Seat | Seattle , United States |
| management | Gary Shenk ( CEO ) |
| Branch | Image archive |
| Website | www.corbis.com |
Corbis is a US digital media company. The business purpose is the sale and distribution of photographs and film materials as well as the associated rights. The collection comprises over 100 million images and competes with Getty Images for the position of the largest image and media archive in the world.
Corbis is headquartered in Seattle , with 21 offices in North America, Australia, Europe and Asia. The company was privately owned by Bill Gates and was founded by him in 1989 under the name Interactive Home Systems . Originally, Bill Gates wanted to secure media content that would be projected for license fees on plasma screens that were supposed to replace the picture frame . In the mid-1990s, a “traditional” picture agency was installed as an intermediate step in order to license the pictures to users. In 2006, the image archive comprised around 100 million images, of which nearly four million are also available online. The majority of this is subject to license.
Corbis was sold to Unity Glory, a company of the Chinese Visual China Group , in January 2016 . Corbis competitor Getty is taking over the licensing of the image database outside of the Chinese region. Getty co-founder Jonathan Klein tweeted: "Nice that we got the milk, cream, cheese, yogurt and meat without buying the cow."
Business areas
Licensing of images and media search
Corbis represents some famous collections, such as the Andy Warhol Foundation collection and the Condé-Nast archive with a variety of historical recordings. Since 1995, Corbis has also owned one of the world's most valuable collections of historical recordings, the Bettmann archive with around 11 million media. Its specialty is the storage location of the originals, deep in a former mine in Pennsylvania. The archive had to move from New York to the new storage facility in order to protect the sensitive negatives, some of which are still on glass photo plates, from being destroyed by humidity and changing temperatures. In the course of this transaction, tens of thousands of z. Some of the valuable originals were irretrievably lost, resulting in a wave of lawsuits from injured photographers.
The famous Sygma archive with around 50 million exhibits is also owned by Corbis. It was added to the collection in 1999 and is kept in France.
Legal Department
Corbis renamed its legal services division to Greenlight in 2008 . She takes care of the licensing of content, its releases, representation of the rights holders and corresponding negotiations as well as rights clearance (clarification of the rights of third parties to images, films, etc.). Greenlight also represents some rightsholders directly, including the personal rights of Bruce Lee , Johnny Cash and June Carter , the Andy Warhol Foundation, Steve McQueen , Mae West , the Wright brothers and Albert Einstein . Corbis generates 20 percent of its turnover with this service (as of 2008).
Broadcasting
Not only images can be licensed, but also footage, e.g. B. for use in commercials.
Media management
In July 2008, Corbis sold its media management division, eMotion LLC, to Open Text .
Branches
The European headquarters in London and other offices are located in New York , Los Angeles , Chicago , Paris , Hong Kong , Kuala Lumpur , Tokyo as well as in Berlin and Vienna .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Company of the Visual China Group takes over assets from Corbis Images Businesswire January 22, 2016
- ↑ Getty Images and Visual China Group form an exclusive worldwide partnership for the distribution of Corbis Images' extensive visual content collection Getty Images January 22, 2016
- ↑ Wassilis Aswestopoulos: Demotix: Grassroots journalism ends in Chinese hands. Telepolis , January 26, 2016, accessed February 25, 2016 .
- ↑ Corbis opens Sygma archive , May 17, 2009