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CEPIC,
the Centre of the Picture Industry, submitted a formal antitrust complaint
against Google’s use of third-party images before the European Commission on
November 8th 2013.The complaint was supported by an unprecedented coalition
of European and US trade associations representing thousands of photographers
and picture agencies worldwide.
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The
complaint addresses Google’s various unauthorized uses of third-party images
in its horizontal Web Search and its specialized services, in particular
Google Images. Google increasingly uses on-line images without the
rightholders’ consent, sometimes even against their explicit wishes. Since
the redesign of Google Images in January 2013, the situation got worse:
Google presents images in full size and high resolution on its site and
enables users to download them without ever having to click through to the
original website hosting the image.
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According to
CEPIC members, 85% of pictures found online by visual search systems are
unlawful copies and 80% of those illegal images have been spread through search
engines such as Google Images. By presenting images out of the context of their
source page, without information on the author and a hardly visible copyright
note, the new design of Google Images significantly increases this problem.
The
picture industry would like an adequate balance between Google’s use of their
content and the benefits they receive in return, in particular traffic on their
websites.
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a fuller version of this story here
For
students Google images provides quick reference points for images. The
ease of reuse of other people’s creations on the web is leading to some content
creators and rights owners, such as the major image libraries, taking steps to
protect copyright by using sophisticated image-matching robots to crawl the web
and find where their images are being used without permission.
In
the past 2 or 3 years many individuals, businesses and institutions, including
Universities , have found themselves being issued with large bills for the use
of such material on their websites without permission.
For
quality sites which append trustworthy information Cardiff Met Library
provides links within its Electronic Library. Excellent sites include Tate Art and
Artists, V&A Collections, MOMA
NY, Google
Cultural Institute, NYPL, Ubuweb (copyright
clearance on this site is not certain) and databases for which we pay to have
access to copyright cleared images such as Bridgeman Education and Worth Global Style Network
