The Picture Licensing Universal System—a cooperative, multi-industry initiative—is a three part system that clearly defines and categorizes image usage around the world, from granting and acquiring licenses to tracking and managing them well into the future.

Through standardized language and a machine-readable coding architecture, image licenses become more transparent, more fair, and much simpler for everyone.

PLUS in no way addresses pricing or price negotiations. Nor will it create rigid forms or contracts. It is purely a system to define licensing language and provide a foundation for building and managing license data.

The PLUS Picture Licensing Glossary
The first component of PLUS is the picture licensing Glossary. Obviously, in order to reach common agreement on license parameters, we must have a common understanding of the language that forms a license. This free listing, created and scrutinized by a broad cross-section of professionals, will be regularly expanded and updated.

The Media Matrix
Secondly, the system needs a backbone. This Media Matrix uniformly specifies international media categories and organizes them by type, with universal billing codes co-developed and approved by image providers and users alike.

The License Format
Finally, the information from the Glossary and Media Matrix will seamlessly populate a universal License Format. This machine-readable data form ties the entire system together, providing a single, worldwide standard for describing licenses. So licensors and licensees can leverage new technologies to write, read, track, store and analyze the details of every image license much more easily. At long last.