Google Images Removes the "View Image" Button After Getty Images Wins the Law Suit

[Ryuzaki]

This isn't really that important but I wanted anyone paying attention to know about it.

I noticed that the "View Image" button was gone on Google Images, but I assumed that certain results now had them removed. I was wrong. Turns out it's a global change for Google after they got rocked in yet another lawsuit in Europe, this time against Getty Images.

The problem was that Google was scraping the net, cataloging images, and then giving direct access to the images on other people's servers, rather than routing them through the website, where they'd learn that a lot of these images are copyrighted or licensed by Getty Images and other stock photography websites.

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You'll see that the normal "View Image" button is gone that was the first in that row of buttons.

This is a win for website owners, who were coughing up a lot of bandwidth to Google Images and getting nothing in exchange for it. At least now we'll have a chance to capture new leads and users, as rare as they might be from a Google Images searcher. Worst case, we get some ad impressions.

Getty Image's complaint was that Google made it too easy for users to re-use images without attribution, to the point of enabling the average and naive internet user to break the law unknowingly.

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Funnily enough, I was able to right click this image and get direct access to the National Geographic URL for it:

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Oh well. That should deter you stealers for a little while until people learn how to right click!

 

[bernard]

Getty Images is a company specializing in bullying naive people into paying extortionate sums for using one of their images. Naive people "stealing" their images is basically their business model.

 

[Aezio]

Pointless update. People who just want the image will find the right click “trick” in no time.

 

[Darth]

Not on mobile

 

[Future State]

Getty Images is a company specializing in bullying naive people into paying extortionate sums for using one of their images. Naive people "stealing" their images is basically their business model.

This is why I crop, flip, and alter the color profile of every picture I post on my sites. Their modus operandi is to crawl the net for their images. All you need to do is fool their crawlers.

One weekend I went nutso on this and read everything I could find. These guys and others like them were creating an affiliate scheme for lawyers where any lawyer could find and take on a "case" like this and pursue it with the backing of the company, and then get paid a portion of the earnings.

But judges wised up to their scheme pretty fast and these cases don't really fly any more. All they'll do now is threaten you with a lawsuit, and if you take the bait, they'll scare you into settling out of court. The reason is, they won't win the lawsuit and it's not worth the money for them to try. They just bully you into giving them money. If you ever get a notice about this, ignore it. If they tell you which image it is, remove it.

Never take the bait. Never respond. And never let them strong arm you into giving them money.

It also helps to get an understanding of fair use when it comes to images on the internet. If you're using the picture as a visual explanation for something in the text, it's fair game because it's educational. If you're using it for a hero or splash image that's purely decoration, you're not protected by fair use.

 

[Frequencies]

This is why I crop, flip, and alter the color profile of every picture I post on my sites. Their modus operandi is to crawl the net for their images. All you need to do is fool their crawlers.

Just buy the images for a small amount ...

For those few pennies doing all that effort seems to me a waste of your time.

If you sell a website with stolen content, do you also put this in the sales contract?

 

[Future State]

If you sell a website with stolen content, do you also put this in the sales contract?

It's not stolen. I explained how I did a lot of research on Fair Use and how as long as it's educational, it's fine. You make a good point, because I wasn't completely clear. I crop, flip, saturate, etc, because it's an SEO trick.

Even when I have bought stock photos for hero images that aren't covered by Fair Use, I still crop and work on them, because they're never in the right proportions for me anyways. And I have to overlay text and other effects anyways.

There's also tons of stock photo sites that have the exact same images as Getty and the rest. I'm sure someone else here can say the same thing, that some of these companies will come after you claiming it's their image, but you paid for it elsewhere. They don't work with exclusives. They play a numbers game of intimidation.

That's a third reason why I do all of that editing work on every single picture, Fair Use or not, SEO or not. You never know when someone is going to try to hurt your operation. You might pull an image off of a free stock photo site only to find out some idiot photographer was stealing someone else's work.

I agree that a few pennies just to dodge a potential problem isn't worth the time. If that was the only benefit I was getting, I'd do like you say.

To answer your question, no, I don't put that in the sales prospectus any more than the rest of us do when we hire writers who (like they all do) rewrite other articles or pieces from other articles. The internet created the remix culture and it's not going any where and like I pointed out above, the legal system understands this and is accommodating it, not punishing it.

 

[Ryuzaki]

You never know when someone is going to try to hurt your operation.

I ran into this last year. A guy I had spoken to several times and adjusted my page to give him links with his permission to use his pictures started contacting a site that linked back to my page as the source of the picture. That was fine, but they told me what he said and he had lied up and down about it all, saying he didn't know who I was, even after we had talked on the phone. I provided proof from emails and his own forum and I got to keep the link. I also re-made the picture and provided it to the site that gave me the link to change out. Then I removed all the links to his site from my site.

I looked into his backlink profile and it was unbelievable. This was all he did. He contacted sites to remove competitor links and replace them with his own, or get his own added, all over a single picture he made over a decade ago. The real question is how did he get so many of us to use this normal-ass picture so much.

People are definitely crawling for their pictures and using Google Alerts on their topic to watch out for it. In my case, it was 100% fair use and he had no grounds to do anything but cry and lie through emails, but it was working for him.