In spring 2002 OnLineArt was founded by 8 visual arts collective management societies : 7 societies are located in Europe (in the EEA 6 + Switzerland) and one in the United States of America. Today OnLineArt counts 16 members and is approached by a rising number of visual arts collective management societies around the globe to join the network.
The societies who founded OnLineArt made decades of experience in licensing uses for the off-line environment and therefore detected immediately new market demands.
The classical categories of uses of rights on works of art are requested by non-commercial entities, such as museums, educational institutions and public broadcasters. But also commercial users such as newspaper-, book-, poster- and calendar- publishers as well as advertisement companies are regularly requesting rights for protected works. Since the advent of the new technologies and their wide spread use, these players started to discover the market in the online world while the traditional uses are continued.
With their perfect knowledge of the culture scene and landscape of potential users situated in the different language and law areas the visual arts collective management societies evaluated the situation and took immediate action to meet the market demands and to provide tailor-made service for the market players.
In addition new users appear on the market which offer commercial services related to visual works through the world-wide-web. Some continue their, while acitivities others disappear after a short business period. The market is still devloping new models; in this challenging situation the flexibility of OnLineArt is an indispensable help to install the necessary rights clearance service on short notice and on a world-wide level.