You could argue that mocking the Getty logo like that is some form of fair use, which would be a backdoor through which it can end up as a legitimate element of a public domain work, in which case it would be fair game.
I agree with you that it is also possible that people posted Getty thumbnails to some sites as though they are public domain, and that is how the AIs learned the watermark.
The embedded Corbis watermark is an issue. That said the fact Getty is selling an image isn’t proof in itself that can not be freely used. They regularly “license” works that have made freely available by the creators.
The whole example was about having exclusive rights so anyone that had the image must be infringing. That presumption is gone once the image is in the public domain.
The problem isn't that Getty is trying to license an image, the problem is Getty is contacting people already using a public domain image and trying to get them to pay them money to use it.
Those links are interesting but just show that Getty is a slimy business that tries to repackage public domain images for sale, not that they infringe the IP of others. That’s a massively different issue.
Getty images are getting sued for selling public domain images. That photo could be legitimately from the researchers with Getty just doing their thing
You're saying it can't be a 1:1 Getty Images watermark but it also can't be generated in a vacuum, so how did that 'recognisable watermark that apparently for some reason resembles a Getty Images watermark but it isn't' get in there?
Either way, under the law, derivative works are still under the copyright holder.
> Copyright protection for the owner of the original copyright extends to derivative works. This means that the copyright owner of the original work also owns the rights to derivative works. Therefore, the owner of the copyright to the original work may bring a copyright infringement lawsuit against someone who creates a derivative work without permission.
> No Machine Learning, AI, or Biometric Technology Use. Unless explicitly authorised in a Getty Images invoice, sales order confirmation or licence agreement, you may not use content (including any caption information, keywords or other metadata associated with content) for any machine learning and/or artificial intelligence purposes, or for any technologies designed or intended for the identification of natural persons. Additionally, Getty Images does not represent or warrant that consent has been obtained for such uses with respect to model-released content.
eh, if they're listed as public domain on the library of congress and Getty got their images there, wouldn't be the library of congress the one committing copyright infringement?
Getty is using the license they got the images with, after all.
Yeah, but also that's not what Getty is doing. They aren't claiming to be the creators, they're just selling something from the public domain, which is legal.
IMO it gets really murky if you create derived works from public domain content. I think people should be able to license derived works (provided they don't infringe on trademarks etc).
If Getty just fails to disclose that the (unmodified?) image is public domain, that strikes me as dishonest.
> Is the deal that Getty doesn't know for sure that they don't own the rights, and therefore it doesn't legally count as deliberate / knowing deception?
It may or may not be fraud but their business is predicated on not merely delivering but establishing provenance for this kind of content. Whoever added the content to the catalog definitely knew where it came from.
>Getty took public domain images and added arbitrary usage limits on them by (fraudulently) claiming to be the sole copyright holder.
The article states this is not the case.
"It acknowledges that the images are in the public domain, but still maintains that it has the right to charge a fee for distributing the material. “Distributing and providing access to public domain content is different to asserting copyright ownership of it,” Getty says."
I have no idea why your replies seem to think you're being outrageous. I've seen the image from one of the AI services that is a very clear almost-reproduction of a Getty Images photo.
I wouldn't want to be the defense's lawyer when that image gets shown to a jury.
In the first listed incident, Getty sent a takedown notice over a public domain image. This is fraud, just as clearly as the scammers who call elderly people and tell them they need to pay some fake fee or bill they didn't know about.
People in this thread keep claiming that because it is public domain, they can do whatever they want with it including license it, which is not true. They can certainly sell it, but a license is a legal instrument that grants usage rights, and Getty cannot grant such rights. To claim to do so is fraud.
"Look, if you want to get a Getty image today, you can find
it without a watermark very simply," he says. "The way you
do that is you go to one of our customer sites and you
right-click. Or you go to Google Image search or
Bing Image Search and you get it there. And that's
what's happening… Our content was everywhere already."
When Getty Images gets in the news in Holland it is usually for sending angry letters, demanding up to a 20.000Euro fine for using an image no greater than 150px by 150px on a non-commercial site, no notice. [1].
"And that's what's happening". Yes, and what happens next is that Getty Images places the misleading "royalty free" on their sites and that using an image found on Google Images on a personal blog gets you a letter from one of their lawyer companies. First few years those letters were sent, not over snail mail, not in the Dutch language, but addressed to postmaster@example.com with references to Irish laws that don't apply here, yet with a deadline to pay up.
With claims of on average a few hundred Euro's vs damages of max. 20-30 Euros, many suspected that Getty profited heavily from having their pictures "everywhere already", preferably not with the original license intact, adding to the profitable confusion.
"Free to use" I don't believe in with this company. It wouldn't surprise me if heavy use of non-watermarked image embedding will lead to more spurious copyright infringement claims [2].
Disclaimer: I received such a letter a few years back when a client provided a thumbnailed image of a pizza they had right-click-saved somewhere. The letter claimed damages for using a full-resolution image with all the publishing rights totaling 750Euro.
I ended up mediating a silly situation between Getty and a client about six years ago.
The client is a manufacturer of consumer goods, mostly kitchenware. They own a boatload of brands. In 2014 or so they did a mountain of photography to reposition an existing professional cookware brand for consumers - lots of lifestyle shots, as well as your usual product shots. They made the images available in an online, access controlled library for their customers to use in their marketing.
About six months after this branding pack is made available, we hear from the client that their customers are getting large payment demands (tens of thousands, in some cases) from Getty for the images that the client provided.
We approached getty on the client’s behalf, as they were just bewildered and didn’t know where to even begin.
It took about two months to sort out - we had to repeatedly explain the situation, while they argued that they owned the images, and had to go through a lengthy process proving that the client owned the images. Burden of proof was totally on us, and we were getting nowhere fast. While looking at some of the supposedly infringing images, we noticed an incredibly faint watermark embedded in one of them that specified the site that the image had been rendered on - an unprotected image library on one of the client’s customer’s sites.
From here, it transpired that Getty had hoovered up everything in that library, assumed rights, and was selling it. Once we started pushing the tack that they had broken several laws by accessing a computer system that was not intended to be available for them to access, and had stolen images from there, the whole thing, along with all of the images on Getty from that library, vanished. They never even responded.
Our takeaway here was that Getty use bots to find large collections of unique high-res images on sites that aren’t explicitly copyrighted, and just take them, on the odds that they’ll get away with it.
We encouraged the client to sue them for damages, but they were so relieved that the problem had gone away that they just wanted to move on.
I agree with you that it is also possible that people posted Getty thumbnails to some sites as though they are public domain, and that is how the AIs learned the watermark.
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