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Microsoft Takes Down Slideshow-Building Tool After Getty Images Lawsuit

Posted by samzenpus on from the big-and-small-pictures dept.

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.

3 of 81 comments (clear)

  1. Did I miss an upgrade? by king+neckbeard · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Was there an upgrade to humanity that I'm not aware of, because the last time I checked, humans were quite bad at these things, even when that is a large portion of their job description.

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    1. Re:Did I miss an upgrade? by Jason+Levine · · Score: 3, 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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  2. Missed Opportunity? by silentbozo · · Score: 4, Interesting

    So... Getty Images, instead of using the power of image-matching algorithms to get more customers for its library by setting up a checkout point at the end of the auto-slideshow and/or tack on advertising (ala YouTube) just torpedoed the whole thing instead.

    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."