I had a feeling the internet copyright fun police had to be involved somewhere. No way Google decides to cripple their product that badly without some kind of legal pressure. It would be funny albeit highly abusive of their position for Google to completely delist Getty from their services, not to damage their business but to prevent copyright infringement of course.

To add to this I wonder what exactly this "new partnership" with Google entails.

http://press.gettyimages.com/getty-images-and-google-announc...

This morning everyone hated Google for hosting news pages on their AMP cache, tonight everyone hates Google for NOT hosting images on their image cache.

The view image button took you to the image hosted on the non-google webserver, it had nothing to do with an image cache (which is still there, its what google shows you in the results).

Couldn't they just introduce a change that would only affect certain websites such as getty? That would be more logical than completely destroying how image search is meant to be.

No, because Getty is in the business of licensing their images to other sites. If an image appears on a news article, it could be from Getty. If it's on a blog post, it could be from Getty.

You could have some protocol by which sites indicated that it can't be linked; but then everyone who embeds a Getty image would have to change their site to adopt that, and that would probably involve Getty having to change their licensing terms to require that, which would be a huge hassle for their customers who probably wouldn't bother doing it because it's difficult and doesn't help them out at all.

Or you'd have to do some kind of watermark embedding.

Anyhow, while it would be technically possible to do one of these things, I suspect that legally it was just a lot simpler to get Google to remove the feature.

That all sounds like a Getty problem.

Which is why they sued. To solve that problem.

> Which is why they sued. To solve that problem.

Except that they didn't solve the problem at all, they only foisted it onto everyone else, who now have to deal with an inferior interface even when they aren't dealing with Getty images.

But that is NOT a Getty problem. Getty's iStockPhoto has its own image search, which is under its control and contains only its own images that are for sale. Crippling other image search products is good for Getty.

Since the change is motivated by legal reasons, I expect logic didn't have much of a voice in the decision.

Right. I was a PM on Google Image Search and, from what I experienced on the team, would assume this is related to the Getty Relationship, not for users’ benefit

And I assume the reason they don't just say the Getty battle is the reason for this is due to other legal concerns about libel and slander. Even if we find alternatives to Google Image search, the alternative will get stuck in the same impossible situation eventually :/

I'm sure they just didn't think of that option.