Getty Images yesterday announced a multi-year licensing partnership with Google. This agreement will allow Google to include Getty Images’ content in search results and across its products and services. Effective immediately, the agreement will enable Google to improve the way it accredits the original contributors. With the two parties partnering on the use of copyrighted content, Google will be able to display Getty Images-owned content in its Image Search while also linking it back to the original work. “We’re excited to have signed this license agreement with Getty Images, and we’ll be using their images across many of our products and services, starting immediately,” said Cathy Edwards, Engineering Director at Google.
Other reports state that Google will be making some major changes to its Image Search as part of this agreement. The search giant will be making copyright disclaimers more prominent and even remove the “View Image” button on the results page that links to the original work. “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 Dawn Airey, CEO, Getty Images. It is still not known whether these clauses will apply only to Getty Images’ content or to all search results. This is a global partnership between the two that will allow Google to use copyrighted content from Getty Images in its Image Search and other product and services for multiple years, the exact number has not been revealed though.
This partnership between Google and Getty Images comes on the heels of the lawsuit that the latter filed against the former in April 2016. Google was accused of displaying high-resolution images in its search results thereby leaving no need for users to visit the original source and promoting piracy. The complaint filed with the European Commission also accused Google of anti-competitive practices and promoting its own products. Google has been fined multiple times for such practices in the past, too. It was recently fined $21.1 million for search bias in India and was fined €2.42 billion back in June 2017 by the European Union for similar accusations.