Getty sues Microsoft: Thows Common Sense out the Window

[CAM]

Well this is interesting and should be an entertaining case:

 

OH SNAP: Getty Images sues Microsoft over Bing pics widget • The Register

 

Microsoft pulls pictures from a search into a website widget (why you'd do this I don't know given the volatility of searches when it comes to suitable content). Getty are all "Hey, my images! Stop stealing! I sue you!" Once again a company throwing sue-balls around when there are some easy ways to stop it:

 

A) Watermark the images. Seriously Getty, easy as anything. There is your copyright and attribution. Restrict access to the un-watermarked images requiring approval.

B) Robots.txt, again easy. If you don't want to scrap your visibility on search engines then explicitly deny the folder or subdomain holding the image stores and let everything else through.

 

Throwing lawsuits everywhere is just silly. I guess the above methods require effort on their part and don't grant a multi-million dollar payout. If companies are going to keep pulling this against search engines then frankly the search companies should blacklist them just as they want....and make their Internet presence go completely dark.

[localzuk]

Neither of those 2 solutions would work for Getty though. Let's say they license an image to the BBC. The BBC sticks it on a news article and then the search engine indexes the BBC. It'll now have that image in its index and it will return when a search is done for related info.

 

You can't have a giant watermark across it - the customers wouldn't use them.

You can't demand that all customers block search engine crawlers with robots.txt files.

 

So, Getty have limited options here.

[CAM]

But throwing these lawsuits around will harm the web and stifle what we can do with it. Getty need to either take measures to block search engines from using their images or accept that fallout will happen and images will drift into results. Am I a criminal if I set my phone to use Twitter or Reddit as a lock image and a Getty image gets caught up in the results?

 

And if it's that hard to block image search results any court order to prevent image usage will become unenforceable anyway. The Internet is completely incompatible with copyright law.

[localzuk]

To be honest, I'm really surprised no-one has introduced a DRM image format, like Jpg with extra metadata which provides usage rules.

 

It wouldn't even need to be super tough, just something that has "acceptable for use on these domains: Blah" metadata, which search engines and the like can then utilise to prevent such images from appearing. It could include a "adult content" flag too, to make that easier to filter out as well.

[CAM]

Because copyright-free image formats are too embedded in the web (far more then video/music formats). If JPG was enforced, everyone would convert them to more open formats anyway.

 

Technically couldn't you do that with existing metadata anyway?

Edited September 5, 2014 by CAM

[localzuk]

Because copyright-free image formats are too embedded in the web (far more then video/music formats). If JPG was enforced, everyone would convert them to more open formats anyway.

 

I dunno about that. If Getty images and other large image houses all started using them, who would be able to say no?

 

Put it this way H.264 has ended up pretty much as the defacto video format on the net - yet it is a licensed format, not free. JPG isn't license free either, as it has patents attached.