[crapnowwhat]

How about a national db of photos that's free for artists to register low res works on. If someone wants to publish with media they don't have a license for you're required to do an image matching search. If you get a match you pay a buck for the contact info of the artist and have to get a license. If the artist finds you used it without paying them a licensing fee and it's registered you pay a fine based on what you made off the usage. So a newspaper maybe has to pay 10% of revenues for the day they ran the image on the front page. I honestly don't know what kind of penalty is appropriate here, but obviously it should be more than can be absorbed as the 'cost of business'.

[morsch]

My first thought as well, but what about photos that aren't in the database?

Either you consider those orphan works which would mean everybody has to submit every photo (or implicitly "license" them as orphaned).

Or you consider them non-orphaned and fall back to all rights reserved, which would make the database little more than a public version of a photo licensing catalogue, several of which already exist.

[crapnowwhat]

Yes, I think it becomes THE licensing site, at least in the UK. I guess in my mind it would leave less wiggle room for infringers. NOTE: not a copyright maximalist at all but I can imagine it sucks to finally get your one great shot out there and . . . no credit given. So yeah puts a burden on artists to register there works but if it's free to do so, seems like a reasonable way to protect your work.

[crapnowwhat]

Also you'd really have to register first then you could publish your own works to prevent others from snapping up orphaned works and trying to pass them off as their own by registering them. The whole thing is probably hugely impractical, but you'd really have to run estimates for coding, storage, admin etc. and since it would be a govt. project it would likely cost way more then it should ;).