Images pass through you. Their owners come with them.
Every upload, listing, repost and print order on your platform is someone’s image. Most of them carry nothing that says whose. A dipmark mark does, inside the pixels, and Gateway lets your systems read it at the moment it matters: before you publish, print, license or train on it.
Protect your people. And yourself.
Behind every image on your platform is a person. The photographer who waited an hour for the light. The designer who spent a week on a label. The small shop that photographed its own products on the kitchen table. When their work is taken and reposted, they rarely blame the person who took it. They blame the place where it happened. And most of them don’t complain. They quietly post less, hold their best work back, or leave.
People stay where they feel safe
Creators share their best work where it is respected. Where it is not, they cover it in watermarks, upload it smaller, or take it somewhere else. Safety is what keeps the good work coming.
Protection is felt, not read
Nobody reads a copyright policy. Everybody remembers the message that said: we recognised your work, and here is where it appeared. That moment does more for loyalty than any page of terms.
Your best people bring the rest
Every audience follows someone. The photographers, artists and brands people come to see are the ones with the most to lose. Keep them, and you keep the reason others arrive.
In protecting them, you protect yourself.
Your name
The story is never ‘someone stole my photo’. It is ‘my photo was stolen on your platform’. Every case you prevent is a headline that never carries your name.
Your responsibility
The rules increasingly ask what you knew and what you did. Being able to show that you checked, and when, is a far stronger position than having to explain why you didn’t.
Your costs
Every dispute caught at upload is a notice, a support ticket, a refund and a lawyer’s hour that never happen.
Gateway lets you stand next to your people, quietly, at the exact moment their work passes through you. And it leaves you with the record that you did.
You host the images. You rarely know whose they are.
Platforms are built to move images fast: upload, resize, re-encode, crop to a thumbnail, serve to millions. Every one of those steps strips what little the file said about its origin. By the time an image reaches your moderation queue or your print line, the metadata is gone, the watermark has been cropped, and the person who made it is a stranger to you.
So you find out about ownership the expensive way: a takedown notice, a chargeback, a public complaint, a lawyer’s letter. Each one is handled by hand, after the fact, and each one costs more than knowing would have at the start.
A mark that lives in the pixels changes the order of events. The information travels with the image through every copy, screenshot and re-save, and your systems can ask for it before anything goes live.
Wherever other people’s images flow through your systems.
Marketplaces
Product photos and listings copied from other sellers or from the brand itself. Spot them at upload, not after the brand writes in.
Social and community apps
Reposts of photographers’ and artists’ work. Know when a post carries someone else’s mark, and credit or route it instead of guessing.
Stock, licensing and agencies
Contributors uploading images they do not own. Check every submission against marked work before it enters your catalogue.
Print-on-demand and photo labs
T-shirts, canvases and prints made from images found online. Hold the order when the image belongs to someone else.
Cloud storage and DAM
Shared folders, client portals and brand libraries. Tell your customers which files carry a mark and whose, across the whole archive.
Newsrooms and publishers
Pictures arriving from social media in a breaking story. Know who to credit, and who to ask, before it goes to print.
AI companies and dataset providers
Training sets built from the web. Find marked images and honour their owners’ choices before they are in the model.
Something else flows through your systems?
Tell us about it →The rules have moved towards knowing.
In the EU, several laws now expect platforms to act on rights in content, quickly and with diligence. Gateway does not make you compliant on its own. It gives you a reliable signal to build those processes on.
Notice and action
Hosting services must run a mechanism for notices about illegal content, including infringing content, and act on them in a timely and diligent way. A readable mark turns a vague notice into a checkable claim.
Best efforts for sharing platforms
Online content-sharing services are expected to make best efforts to obtain authorisation, and to prevent the availability of works rightholders have identified. A mark is information the rightholder has already attached to the work.
Copyright policy and transparency
Providers of general-purpose AI models must put in place a policy to comply with EU copyright law, including rightholders’ opt-outs from text and data mining. Knowing which images in a dataset are marked, and by whom, is a practical part of that.
A short summary, not legal advice. Which obligations apply to you depends on your service, its size and where you operate; ask your counsel.
From handling complaints to knowing at the start.
- 01
Know before you publish
The check runs inside your upload or order flow. A marked image is recognised before it is live, printed or licensed.
- 02
Route, don’t guess
When an image belongs to someone else, the owner can be told where it surfaced, without exposing your user to them. You decide whether that happens.
- 03
Fewer disputes
Problems you catch at upload never become notices, chargebacks or headlines. The ones that still arrive come with a checkable answer.
- 04
Clean catalogues and datasets
Audit what you already hold. Know which images carry a mark, and keep the record of what you checked and when.
- 05
A reason for creators to choose you
Photographers, artists and brands publish more where their work is respected. Reading their mark is a visible commitment.
- 06
Your rules, your decision
Gateway answers a question. Whether to allow, hold, ask for a licence or credit the owner is your policy, applied by your systems.
Five gates. Open the ones you need.
Each gate is a narrow, documented interface into your existing systems. Start with one and add the others as they prove useful.
Upload gate
Send each new upload, or its address, as it arrives. Within the flow you get an answer: no mark found, or marked, with the owner and how sure the reading is. Your system decides what happens next.
Archive audit
Point us at a bucket, a catalogue export or a list of addresses. We check the back catalogue in batches and return a report you can act on and keep.
Mark at the source
Let your own creators mark their work as they export or publish it, inside your product. Every copy that later leaves your platform carries their name.
Owner routing
When a marked image turns up on your platform, the owner can be informed of where it surfaced, with your user kept private. Opt-in, under your policy.
Dataset check
Before training, run a dataset through the check. Marked images are listed with their owners, so you can exclude them or seek a licence.
Four steps, no change to your stack.
- 1
Agree the gate
We define together which gate, which volumes and which response times you need, under a data processing agreement.
- 2
Connect
You receive credentials for a dedicated endpoint. Send images or their addresses from wherever your flow already handles them.
- 3
Receive an answer
Each check returns a short, stable answer your systems can read, and a reference you can keep for your records.
- 4
Act on your policy
Allow, hold, credit, ask for a licence or inform the owner. The decision and the action stay with you.
{ "result": "marked", "owner": "Studio North", "copy": "issued to Agency West", "confidence": "high", "reference": "chk_7Q2M…" }
Built so that a platform can say yes.
Nothing about the engine leaves
You integrate an answer, not a method. The interface tells you what was found, never how.
Your users stay yours
Owner routing never reveals who uploaded an image. What is shared, and with whom, is set out in the agreement.
Data under contract
What we process for you, for how long and where, is fixed in a data processing agreement before the first image is sent.
Honest answers
A damaged copy is reported as damaged, with how sure the reading is. We would rather say ‘not sure’ than guess.
Open a gate.
Gateway is in a pilot with a small number of platforms. Tell us what flows through your systems, which gate you are thinking of, and roughly how many images a day. We reply with a proposal for a pilot.
Write to info@dipmark.com- What kind of platform you run
- Which gate, or which problem
- Approximate daily volume
- Where your users are (EU, US, elsewhere)