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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.

10 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. Re:Did I miss an upgrade? by Dishevel · · Score: 3, Insightful
      He was right though. Copyright is a government granted right. To encourage production of copyrightable material.

      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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  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."

    1. Re:Missed Opportunity? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

    2. Re:Missed Opportunity? by nine-times · · Score: 3, 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."

  3. Re: So a company by nine-times · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I don't know if they technically "produce" anything, but they sure provide a service that lots of businesses use.

  4. Hmmm... tough call by istartedi · · Score: 4, 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.

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  5. Re: So a company by Oligonicella · · Score: 3, Insightful

    "Produces nothing"? YAAFM. Providing a highly sought after service is not producing nothing.

  6. Re: So a company by Sarten-X · · 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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