back to article Google Images: EU Commish opens new front against Chocolate Factory

In its latest round of questions sent to rivals regarding the activities and workings of Google, the European Commission has turned the spotlight on the search giant’s image grabbing facilities. Its most recent questionnaires (RFIs, or requests for information) contain five pages of detailed questions on the issue, revealed …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    This case is dragging on so long

    It reminds me of the FTC case against Microsoft. By the time they actually decide anything, it will be too late to help the competition that will be long out of business and Google will already have peaked in its ability to exercise its monopoly power.

    1. Lars Silver badge

      Re: This case is dragging on so long

      So rather carry on than give up I would suggest after all.

    2. osnofla

      Re: This case is dragging on so long

      Not very much so this time and with this issue. For the moment Google has become a portion on a bigger cake just in case.

    3. jnffarrell1

      Re: This case is dragging on so long

      And there will be no fine unless like Microsoft, Google fails to assign an intern to check on EU compliance at design reviews an report back to Page.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    WTF?

    I'm curious what the actual issue is.

    I'm no fan fo many Google practises, but what is the ACTUAL issue.

    Surely Getty would

    a) only allow Google to crawl low-res versions or

    b) watermark the hi-res ones.

    In fact most of my searches include -stock to AVOID the likes of Getty.

    I think the issue would be if I publish an image of Getty's on MY website and then Google scraped that and then linked to that.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: I'm curious what the actual issue is.

      And of course Getty never 'borrows' other peoples images from the net.

      This whole thing is just microsoft throwing its toys out of the pram because more people use Google search than use Bing.

      1. Dr Stephen Jones

        Re: I'm curious what the actual issue is.

        It's going to be hard to beat this for Idiot of the Day.

        Only one question matters: is Google breaking competition law?

        Do yourself a favour and find out what it is.

        http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CELEX:12008E102:EN:HTML

  3. Daggerchild Silver badge

    Uh Oh

    I could easily see image usage becoming a legal opt-in, rather than an opt-out, in Europe.

  4. jnffarrell1

    Problem solved already

    Google snippets are at most 1080 p. Indexing and categorizing all the objects in an image is a transform ative use, that copyrights were meant to encourage.

    People forget that time-limited exclusive rights to published/patented info are intended to support the public good through widely sharing information

  5. ZenCoder

    robots.txt

    User-agent: Googlebot-Image

    Disallow: /images/HR/*.png$

    User-agent: Googlebot-Image

    Disallow: /

    ...

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "...almost never diverts to the source sites of the images,” Getty said.

    For some categories of images, you're more likely to catch malware by visiting the original site.

  7. Pascal Monett Silver badge

    "Google has succeeded in [...] created a captive environment "

    Well duh, that's what you get when use Google's API everywhere.

    Apparently, someone should tell Getty that it is possible, as a poster above has already said, to control web spider acces to one's site. I remember 15 years ago having found out that a page on my own personal website was being displayed somewhere else without any credits to me and without copying the entire frame, just the data they wanted, so that everyone would think it was their own page. I quickly found out how to force them to display my entire page, with my header and logo.

    If I can do that all by my lonesome, I do believe a company, let alone Getty, would have the means to do something about Google's image copying.

    1. Dr Stephen Jones

      Re: "Google has succeeded in [...] created a captive environment "

      You're totally missing the point. The owner of the images wants Google to use them fairly, and not prejudice its commercial business, or crush competition. Getty seems happy with fair use, thumbnail style.

      Can you see no middle ground between Getty blocking any use of the images by Google, and Google doing whatever it wants with Getty's images? If you can't, I feel sorry for you.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        WTF?

        Re: "Google has succeeded in [...] created a captive environment "

        So why can't you grasp you don't allow Google to crawl your un-watermarked hi-res images. It's not hard,really, anyone with 30 seconds looking at robot.txt could grasp the concept, let alone htaccess.

        And lets not forgot removing the ability to hot link.

      2. Pascal Monett Silver badge

        @Dr Jones

        What I said was would have the means to do something. I didn't say anything about blocking completely, nor did my example imply that that is what I was thinking.

        You came up with blocking entirely on your own.

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