Microsoft Takes Down Slideshow-Building Tool After Getty Images Lawsuit 81
jfruh writes Slideshows are an increasingly popular (and, for publishers, lucrative) web content genre. So why not automate their production? Microsoft had a beta tool that was part of Bing Image Search that did just that, but took it down in the face of a lawsuit from Getty Images. It turns out that, unlike a human web content producer, Bing couldn't distinguish between images publishers have the rights to use and images they didn't.
So a company (Score:1, Insightful)
that produces nothing just stifled innovation. Go go content rights owners!! We have these parasites and a few posts down we have true movers and shakers like Musk.
Re: So a company (Score:5, Insightful)
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You mean images on the internet police? They just killed my chance of making some $$ from people who might have used my images on their sites. I can then log who used them and send them a polite invoice for say $5 per image usage.
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Re: So a company (Score:4, Insightful)
"Produces nothing"? YAAFM. Providing a highly sought after service is not producing nothing.
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Careful with throwing around those "FM" tags - Because yes actually, providing a service very much does not mean they "produce" anything. Getty stands in the middle of real work, between producing photos and producing creatives, adding nothing but fees as their value-add proposition.
In the case of Getty, they provide a service in many ways inferior to GIS or BIS, which kinda counts as the whole reason we have t
Re: So a company (Score:5, Insightful)
In the case of Getty, they provide a service in many ways inferior to GIS or BIS, which kinda counts as the whole reason we have this topic in the first place - MS's cute little slideshow widget worked better than Getty, thereby completely shutting Getty out of the picture.
Anyone actually interested in paying for stock photos, OTOH, already understands the difference between freely available vs licensed content, and damned well won't risk their job "accidentally" ripping off random photographers.
That's cute.
Let's say I'm interested in paying for a stock photo. I go to Google, and search for my project's key terms. I get seven cats, thirteen memes, and a mugshot on the first bunch of results. I try different terms, find one I like, and... then what? Not every website includes contact information, and if they aren't outright trying to sell me pictures, I have to go hunting to even figure out where to ask.
Maybe I'm lucky, and I find a site with contact information. I call up the photographer, and he's willing to negotiate. There's a back-and-forth exchange where I offer some amount of money, and he wants a hundred times that. Forget it.
I go back to Google, and try again, luckily remembering the refined search terms I used in the last round. In amongst the blogs written by that license-lacking Grandma, there's another candidate for my project. Searching Google for that image doesn't show any other sources, and it obviously isn't Grandma's original work, so there's another wasted effort.
Finally, I hit the jackpot. I find a photographer who has posted prices, and has a decent picture that fits my needs... but he only takes PayPal payments, and says he'll email me a copy of the picture in "good resolution", whatever that means. One of his pictures looks familiar, and sure enough, a bit of investigation shows that it's a pretty common candid of an office worker, used in catalogs and on support pages across the Internet. Could it be that this guy's the silently-famous photographer, or is he just selling others' work to make a quick buck? It's a bit too risky for me, so that "jackpot" is another dead end.
I give up. I'm well on the way to spending more time on the project than it's worth. If only there were some other company to do the sourcing work for me. They could negotiate with photographers, index pictures by business-relevant keywords, and provide reputable proof that I'm actually getting a legitimate license to the material I'm paying for. All of that risk is eliminated, and the project could stay within a constant time and financial budget.
The service Getty provides is ultimately the same as any other broker: risk mitigation. They do the acquisition work, and assume the risk of high acquisition costs. They also do resale, and assume the risk of having unsold goods. Because they work on a large scale, they can specialize enough to reduce those risks to an affordable level, and I can simply pay that cost, plus a bit of profit for them, to benefit from their specialization. Getty earns that profit, and I spend less overall because I'm not wasting time on those dead ends. Everybody wins, so everybody's happy with the trade. That's how commerce is supposed to work.
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Maybe I'm lucky, and I find a site with contact information. I call up the photographer, and he's willing to negotiate. There's a back-and-forth exchange where I offer some amount of money, and he wants a hundred times that. Forget it.
Heh, I wish just once someone who contacted me about using my images had any money at all. The only requests I've ever gotten were from people looking for entirely free use. I would have gladly taken $20 just to be able to say I'd once sold something.
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Oh, I wasn't even actively trying to sell. I just had some art on my web site that I'd done for fun and wanted to show off. I only got a small handful of contacts, but all of them were looking for free. One of them was even a "conference," which seemed like it ought to have *some* funds. Though it was also South Korea in the early 2000's, so I'm not sure what things were like then.
I appreciate your taking the time to make the suggestion, though.
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Mr.Lube stands in the middle of real work, between having a bottle of oil and having a vehicle with clean oil, adding nothing but fees as their value-add proposition.
But saying that services are producing nothing is a bit ingenious -- its "producing" extra free time for anyone who would have to perform the service (and for that matter, learn how to perform the service) themselves if they weren't using the provided service.
Of course if Ford invents some automated/easy way to do an oil change and Mr.Lube sues
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In so many cases, the "rights owners" are middlemen who played no part in the artistic process. I would like to see the fungibility of intellectual property eliminated. Patents and copyrights would be treated as a personal right of the creator of work. Any other exploiting party would have to maintain a contractual relationship with the creator to use the work, with no one else owning it except for the artist or inventor.
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Nothing prevents photographers from invoking Getty as a service, just as authors hire editors online to go over their e-book offerings. The creator would be the one to retain control of the work. In the case covered here, I can't see artists rejecting a perfectly good way of getting their work to the market.
Did I miss an upgrade? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Did I miss an upgrade? (Score:4, Interesting)
Exactly this. Too many times I hear from people "Well, I just grabbed this from Google Images because if it's on the Internet it's public domain." There are some people who seem to think that the act of putting something online somehow strips it of all copyright protections. At the very least, a computer program could be trained to spot copyright information and determine whether or not an image was allowed to be displayed. (It would require a lot of cooperation and coding work and wouldn't work in all cases, but it is possible.)
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Wrong, and wrong!
Images, and content (news items) have copyright of their rightful owners.
Now, some people prefer to ignore the rule of law, but copyright holders have the right to decide where and how their work is displayed.
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Once released, it is in the public domain. Only government edict states otherwise. Copyright is a privilege
Images, and content (news items) have copyright of their rightful owners.
Only via government edict, which the government has power to abridge or revoke.
Re:Did I miss an upgrade? (Score:4, Insightful)
It is not a protected right it is a granted privilege. Rights are protected from being removed by others. Copyright and Patent are granted privileges.
You can call it whatever you want but truth is truth.
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Making money, free healthcare, and union benefits are not rights.
The right to speak your opinion without government punishing you, the right to live, and so on are rights. It may be really beneficial to society to give free healthcare. It may not. But it is not a right. Too many of you whiny entitled self important young uns think everything nice is a right that people are owed.
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I think OP is using `public domain` in its old, Amiga-era definition, which is probably closest nowadays to freeware.
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100% wrong
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright
Copyright is granted automaticly its not nessary to register but it makes enforcing your copyright much easyer. And FYI copyright last 50 years PAST the death of the author or creator. You don't have to like it or agree but that's the fact. Your claims are 100% incorrect and misleading to those people who do not know the truth.
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Just creating links to your image is not copying it.
Deep linking is legal or the entire WWW is illegal. Can't have it both ways.
Just organizing links to your images with my own text surrounding the links is not copying it.
Creating a program to programmatically present a sequence of links to your images over time to a web-browser-image-copying-program is not copying it.
Some else's web browser may indeed copy your image onto their computer, but you were definitely allowing that anyway by publishing the image
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Nope. I can take a photo and put it on my website. By doing so, I'm granting people the right to view that photo and make copies of it in the process of viewing it. If they want to save it locally for their own personal use, there's not much I can do to stop them. (That's part of the trade-off of putting it online.)
If, however, someone decides that it is a great photo and they want to sell shirts, coffee mugs, posters, etc bearing the photo, they need to come to me to ask for permission. If they want t
Missed Opportunity? (Score:5, Interesting)
You figure they had the tech to identify the infringing images to begin with. Why not just say to Microsoft "hey, we have this set of algorithms that you're welcome to use to improve your widget. Let's talk about blanket licensing for Bing in exchange for downstream revenue."
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From TFA:
Microsoft's Bing now says on its website that "We have temporarily removed the beta." The company said Monday in an email that it had temporarily removed the widget "so we can take time to talk with Getty Images and better understand its concerns."
So it sounds like they are trying to do just that. The take down was probably to appease Getty so they don't harm the deal.
Re:Missed Opportunity? (Score:4, Insightful)
That could always come later. It wouldn't be unusual for something like that to start with someone saying, "Look, we may be interested in some kind of partnership, but first take the whole thing down until we can work out licensing."
Maybe we need an HTML tag for image/work copyright (Score:2)
tag the image as commercial and it gets filtered in image search Tag it with say CC and Public and it shows up.
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Even better, make it pop up a big flashy ad telling you where you can buy this and much much more! Our prices are insane! First 3000 customers get a free refrigerator magnet!
void where prohibited by law
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Not an HTML tag. It needs to be some kind of metadata embedded in the image itself. There are places in various formats for these things; I guess we just need better tools to read and write them.
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Alternatively, DRM images like we do music so it cannot be linked outside the site(s) allowed to show it.
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Followed by tools to strip it out, and tools to replace it with your own information, and tools to break into web servers and silently modify all of their images to show that you own them.
Nope. DRM is not going to save us.
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I put my copyright info and website address in the EXIF data of all my images, actually all modern digital cameras can do this automatically.
In case anyone doesn't know about EXIF data, you may be surprised at the amount of data your phone is adding to every image you take with the phone's camera. GPS coordinates, time and date, phone make and model, etc.
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Still wouldn't help (see my previous comment on why the HTML tag doesn't work). Embedded tags can be modified, which means they cannot be trusted to assert the rights usage of an image. I could tag one of your images as CC... that doesn't make it actually CC. You cannot know that an image is CC or any other license unless you talk to the original license holder. What you have to have is a central registry, curated by humans, where someone can upload an image and certify "this is my image" and that database
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Doesn't work. Just because I tag your image as CC doesn't make it CC. You have to know the origin of an image. That means a ubiquitous search of the Internet to find the original posted source -- possibly through several contortions. That's the problem with using anything other than a curated database of images. It takes some significant leg work to prove who has the right to release a particular Internet image for licensing.
The only thing that a tag does is simplify the search engine front end for who you
Sigh... (Score:1)
I'm one of the first in line to bash MS, but how is the copyright violations that users perpetutate, MS' fault? It's same with Google as far as I'm concerned, and content in its search indexes. They, MS and Google, are providing all the information of the offending parties, so why go after MS/Google? Is this strictly a 'bigger target=more publicity='all press is good press' equation here, we're seeing from Getty images?
From a consistency standpoint, I don't like the direction this is taking us on the web. E
Hmmm... tough call (Score:5, Funny)
On the one hand, it's Getty images. On the other, they're reducing the number of slide shows. Sorry. I have to side with Getty on this one. Anything that reduces the number of slideshows in the 'net is good.
Dear Getty (Score:2)
People who go to the museum aren't going to stop going to the museum because the pictures appear on Bing.
More people seeing the aren't will me your collection is worth more money.
A museum is more then the art. It's an experience.
Never Mind. (Score:2)
I rad the article, but I swore it was the Getty Museum. Probably becasue I was talking about the Getty Museum this morning my brain just filled in parts for me.
mea culpa
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But... that picture belongs in a museum! /indy
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Posting via voice recognition?
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Big words from an AC tough guy.
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Yep. Plus I tried to rewrite a previous sentence.
It's still my fault for not correcting the post before submitting it.
OTOH, it's Slashdot and the idiots hear have made caring hard.
"More people seeing the art will make your collection worth more money."
Of course, nothing compares to the fact that I read it as the Getty Museum, initially.
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just an FYI the internet has had porn in video form for quite some time now, you will find it also can provide the same type of 'hands free' operation
meh, public domain. (Score:1)
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The whole point of the internet is to share informaiton. That's why it was created, that's why you can't really lock anything down.
Corporation then jump on and want to bend it to how they think it should work.
Frankly, I'm tired of corporation dictating how the public internet should work. They can build their own global network.
I thought we were seeing the end of powerpoint. (Score:3)
This summary just built up my hopes and then shattered them. Oh look, another meeting. I can't wait to see more stupid pictures and charts of information that can't possibly be read from a distance greater than 3 feet from the projection screen.
Slideshow rights... (Score:3)
...Slideshows are an increasingly popular... web content genre...
I wish someone would claim the rights to web slideshows, and make everyone take 'em all down. I have been unable to find a more vacuous space waster on the web than the current abundance of slideshows. I'd almost rather watch cat videos..... (no flames please, I did say 'almost')
Dog bites dog (Score:2)
Just rejoice that it happens once in a while.
From the article.... (Score:2)
From the article "Rather than draw from a licensed collection of images, Defendant gathers these images by crawling as much of the Internet as it can, copying and indexing every image it finds, without regard to the copyright status of the images and without permission from copyright owners like Plaintiff,"
I wonder why Google wasn't charged, too? Isn't that how their image search works?
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Because they just show them too you with links to the source pages, rather than taking those images and creating a slide show out of them for you to put on a web page somewhere.
oy (Score:2)
It turns out that, unlike a human web content producer, Bing couldn't distinguish between images publishers have the rights to use and images they didn't.
You have to know that's joke-bait. I see what you did there!