Since It Can't Sue Us All, Getty Images Embraces Embedded Photos
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For the past decade or so, the best defense Getty Images could find against the right-click button on your mouse—home of the “copy” and “save” functions—has been a team of scary lawyers. By copying one of its images and using it on your blog, you’re entering a random drawing where the prize is a terrifying letter offering a tutorial in copyright litigation. But this week the photography company is embarking on a different strategy: Anyone can now visit its website, grab some embed code, and display an image on blogs or Facebook (FB) pages without paying a licensing fee. As a technological feat, of course, embeddable media is unremarkable. It’s a basic feature on YouTube and Twitter (TWTR) and many other major websites. Yet it marks an unlikely pivot for Getty, which makes its money selling permission to use photos from its vast library of work from more than 150,000 individuals, stock photo agencies, and media organizations. Creating an embedding tool is a tacit acknowledgment that Getty simply can’t police the use of its images to the four corners of the Internet. Craig Peters, a senior vice president at Getty, is more explicit about the futility of trying to maintain control of its images. Three years ago, Getty acquired PicScout, which makes a technology to crawl the Web and track the images appearing online. PicScout described itself an intellectual-property protection service, but Getty eventually learned a different lesson from the acquisition: The problem of purloined images is too big to solve on a lawsuit-by-lawsuit basis. Peters found that “tens of millions” of Getty photos have been shared without legal licensing. “There are two ways to look at the world,” he says. “People sharing content without a license is an issue—or it’s an opportunity.” |
Looks like a win win for bloggers who want to use Getty Images without paying or getting sued.
There is a catch though:
| The embedding tool is intended only for noncommercial uses. In many cases, Peters says, publishers will prefer to pay for images because they will get more control and won’t have embedded images sending information about their Web traffic back to Getty. Embedded images will not be allowed in contexts that promote products or businesses. “That’s a pretty clear delineation,” Peters says. “We’ll enforce the terms of this license if people start using these images to do that.” |
Just when you think you've got it all figured out, someone changes the rules.
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