Property Rights

Getty Images complained enough about their right to intellectual property that Google basically disabled their image search engine.

That's right, go search for an image, and then try to view or save that image. And then wind your clocks back to the year 2005ish.

We now have to revert to searching through an entire website in order to find the image we've already "searched". Not ideal; in fact, it ultimately defeats the purpose of an image search function in the first place.

Not sure which part is more upsetting, that image searching just took a step back ten years, or that such a large entity as Getty is so clueless about how the modern world works. (Then again, there seems to be a lot of that going on these days.) And by clueless, I mean not recognizing the existence of a thing called the right-click.

In case you're having the same facepalm moment as myself, yes, right-clicking on the image and "open in new tab" completely defeats the purpose of the new changes, and erodes our confidence in large cultural institutions such as Getty, both at the same time.

Also, trademarks and logos are excluded from this new change.

Anger at Google image search 'peace deal'
Feb 2016, BBC


Post Script

But wait, because it doesn't end there. I like to provide proper source references for the imagery used on my page, just because. The problem I run into lately is this - many of the images I want to use have been populated to my search results from Pinterest (because they are owned by Google, let's not forget, it's no coincidence they run the image-search game). And people who post on Pinterest are very unlikely to leave source credits. And yet Pinterest is owned by Google, and so they dominate the image search results. So the chances of my finding the image on a site that gives its source due credit are close to zero. Soo, as a person who wants to do the right thing - the thing that Getty wants me to do, and the thing that Google ostensibly wants me to do - I cannot, because of the very entity that has made these changes in the interest of 'doing the right thing'. That's enough for today.


Post Post Script

Now we've covered that, it seems an appropriate moment to remind ourselves about the specifics of intellectual property. As a creator, all you have to do to gain the right to your own intellectual property is to make the thing.

You're a musician? Make a recording. Artist? Make a painting. Writer? Write it down. Once you have fixed that intellectual product into some physical form - be it a recording, painting, or even a poem scratched into the dirt and then photographed - you own it.

So that sounds great. Until you think about how some cultures, like the people who lived in America before Europeans, do not fix much of their cultural products into physical forms. Sand paintings? Not fixed. Tribal songs? No recording equipment, not fixed.

If you get upset because you can't find that Getty image, just take some cultural products from a culture that has no property rights (intellectual or physical). Public domain forever!

Grimm's fairy tales, that's another one. They were spoken, not written down. So when Disney went and took them all and made cartoons out of them...