Re: Re I don't get it?
"Neither comes across as a saint here."
Exactly - sort of. Getty aren't helping themselves if they aren't doing something to prevent this from happening to the images on their own site such as using a suitable robots.txt entry to stop Google scraping the images in the first place.
However, there's also the problem of third parties who are legitimately using images supplied by Getty - the images on those third party sites will still be found by Google, and still offered up to people using Google, who can save and use them, just as they can now. Robots.txt on Getty's own site won't help a jot here.
It's a tougher problem - but it is part of the same one - and it's not something for which Getty are to blame themselves. Partly, it's "because of the way the internet works" - the old "once it's out there, that's it, you have no control" problem.
Google, however, could mitigate the problem to some extent: Not easily presenting the full size version would be a start. Since most people probably don't disable Javascript, where they do present images, they could use a bit of script to prevent right-click saving. Perhaps they could overlay their own watermark to advise viewers that the image may not be free to use.
Ultimately, they should force visitors to the site on which the image is hosted, rather than make it easy for people not to go there. Once there, what happens is another matter - but Google will have done their part, and not made it easy to grab images without considering rights.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
