Google Images finally adds photo credit to its listings and metadata →

A deal signed with Getty forced Google to make a number of changes to how people search and access photos through the site.

Google has finally acquiesced to demands from photographers and content creators across the world by adding important metadata to every photo found in its search engine. The move culminates a year of massive changes to Google's image search after Getty Images filed a 2016 antitrust lawsuit against them in the EU.

Getty eventually withdrew the lawsuit in February after agreeing to a partnership with Google that included many of the changes announced today. Getty Images is one of many news or content organizations who have long charged that Google effectively aids digital piracy by making it easy for users to take images without knowing anything about who took or made the image and who owns the rights.

In their 2016 lawsuit, Getty claimed Google's practices "promoted piracy, resulting in widespread copyright infringement, turning users into accidental pirates," and said Google's "view image" function -- which allowed you to view an image without going to its original location -- was a specific effort by the company to "reinforce its role as the Internet's dominant search engine, maintaining monopoly over site traffic, engagement data and advertising spend."

"Artists need to earn a living in order to sustain creativity and licensing is paramount to this; however, this cannot happen if Google is siphoning traffic and creating an environment where it can claim the profits from individuals' creations as its own," Getty Images lawyer Yoko Miyashita said.

In a blog post yesterday, Google Product Manager Ashutosh Agarwal said they were working with the Center of the Picture Industry (CEPIC) and International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC) to set up better rules for attribution and create clearer guidelines that kept things easy for users while protecting the rights of the content owners.

"As part of a collaboration between Google, photo industry consortium CEPIC, and IPTC, the global technical standards body for the news media, you can now access rights-related image metadata in Google Images," he wrote.

"It's traditionally been difficult to know the creator of images on the web, as well as who might own the rights. This information is often part of image metadata, and is key to protecting image copyright and licensing information. Starting today, we've added Creator and Credit metadata whenever present to images on Google Images."

Google removed the "view image" button in February as part of the deal to end the Getty lawsuit, forcing many users to go through the host website to find the image. While there is still a way around this, a number of Google users complained that photos were often difficult to find within websites and some outlets had protected their images so they could not be downloaded at all. Google also made significant changes to the search by image function to reflect their commitment to protecting creators' rights.

Getty and Google agreed to a years-long partnership in February that will see them license their work to Google and assist in improving the search engine's capabilities regarding images.

"We will license our market leading content to Google, working closely with them to improve attribution of our contributors' work and thereby growing the ecosystem," said Getty Images CEO Dawn Airey said in a statement earlier this year.

Agarwal said Google will also be rolling out a Copyright Notice feature in the coming months as well, which will attach legal information to other metadata that comes with photos.

Google has made a concerted effort this year to work with news outlets and photo websites to assuage complaints that the search giant was purposefully robbing hundreds of websites of ad revenue by allowing users to effectively bypass these websites for their content. Last year, Google was fined 2.42 billion Euros by the EU for distorting their search results in order to push users to their own services, specifically for shopping, as opposed to others. Google was forced to make changes to their algorithm due to the fine, and it brought a greater spotlight on the search engine's practices.

But image creators are rejoicing at Google's decision, hopeful that the changes will bring better photo attribution and revenue to those creating the content itself.

"Employing IPTC metadata standards in Google Images results will help ensure proper attribution of credit and support photographers' copyright, while also boosting the discoverability of content and creators," said Andrew Fingerman, CEO of PhotoShelter.

"This is a win for the professional photo community."

*this article was featured on Download.com on September 28, 2018: https://download.cnet.com/blog/download-blog/google-images-finally-adds-photo-credit-to-its-listings-and-metadata/

EU copyright reform proposal: 3 things businesses need to know →

The controversial copyright measure is making its way through the European Parliament ahead of a committee vote on June 20 and parliamentary vote in July or September.

Members of the European Parliament are trading barbs over a proposed measure that could have drastic effects on the internet in Europe. The update to the EU Copyright Directive does a number of things, but the significant changes come to how information is shared and copyright infringement, specifically noted in Article 13 of the proposal.

The European Parliament described the law as creating "a new ancillary right for news publishers, often dubbed 'the link tax', and second, it places a new general obligation on internet platforms and websites to pre-monitor user content on their website for copyright infringements."

This has sent shockwaves through the internet and has pitted major news outlets and media companies against internet giants like Google and Wikipedia, which would suffer most under the new rules.

Jan Gerlach, Public Policy Manager for the Wikimedia Foundation, said the new rule "threatens freedom of expression, collaboration, and diversity online." She takes aim squarely at the Commission's suggestion that all websites needed to "implement upload filters, or, as they call them, 'effective content recognition technologies'."

"As currently written, Art. 13 would harm freedom of expression online by inducing large-scale implementation of content detection systems," Gerlach said. "People's ability to express themselves online shouldn't depend on their skill at navigating opaque and capricious filtering algorithms. Automatic content filtering based on rightsholders' interpretation of the law would—without a doubt—run counter to these principles of human collaboration that have made the Wikimedia projects so effective and successful."

The rule change is currently under debate and the European Parliament's legal affairs committee will vote on it on June 20. It will then move to a parliamentary vote in either July or September.

Here are the three things businesses need to know.

1. News sites to get extra copyrights

The law will require everyone to get a license from news outlets before they publish links to stories. The short snippet and photo you see when you share a story on Facebook and Twitter would now be considered copyright infringement.

Other countries like Germany and Spain have tried link taxes before to no avail, and news publishers quickly soured on them as well. The only place to manage it effectively is China, where they have much stricter controls on the news that is published.

German politician and Member of the European Parliament Julia Reda said the measure would be nearly impossible for some websites to contend with and would place an unnecessary burden on the wrong people.

"Reciting a headline from the cold war era would suddenly require permission from the original publisher, who may have long since gone out of business. Where the Commission wants to apply this right to press publishers only, Mr. Arimont explicitly includes academic publishers, a move that would spell disaster for any open access initiatives," Reda said.

2. Copyright infringement checks

All internet platforms would be required to scan all user content for any potential copyright infringement. They do not say how websites should accomplish this task, and presumably assume they should either develop their own mechanism for checking user content or hire third-party companies to manage it for them, a costly endeavor for any business.

Dutch intellectual property professor Dr Martin Senftlebens said the rule would lead to "further market concentration and less information diversity."

"It will be much more difficult to find investors for new start-up platforms," Senftlebens said.

Some European parliament members backed the measure, questioning why websites can filter for racist or offensive content but cannot make exceptions for copyrighted material.

"There are filters in terms of sensitive content, fighting terrorism and racism and incitement to hatred - so why should it be so hard to extend filtering to copyrighted content? We have the mechanisms already," said French MEP Jean-Marie Cavada.

3. Review process

Websites will also be forced to create a review process to allow rightsholders to update this database of copyrighted works with more copyrighted works. This process will be costly for smaller websites and presents a host of problems that have yet to be addressed by parliament.

Cory Doctorow of the Electronic Frontier Foundation wrote that the rule will fall apart because copyright infringement software is still not good enough. YouTube developed its own and is still continuously criticized by media companies for failing to stop more people from stealing work.

But at its core, Doctorow said, the law goes after the wrong people.

"Article 13 punishes any site that fails to block copyright infringement, but it won't punish people who abuse the system. There are no penalties for falsely claiming copyright over someone else's work. It will be a lot easier to make these false claims that it will be to figure out which of the hundreds of millions of copyrighted claims are real and which ones are pranks or hoaxes or censorship attempts," Doctorow said.

"Article 13 also leaves you out in the cold when your own work is censored thanks to a malfunctioning copyright bot. Your only option when you get censored is to raise an objection with the platform and hope they see it your way—but if they fail to give real consideration to your petition, you have to go to court to plead your case."

*this article was featured on TechRepublic.com on June 8, 2018: https://www.techrepublic.com/article/eu-copyright-reform-proposal-3-things-businesses-need-to-know/