Google’s Matt Zitzman was on the hot seat last week at the 2010 picture buyers fair in London regarding Image Search and copyright stripping. To be fair the question was a bit loaded but it also reflects a lack of understanding regarding image metadata from the search giant.
Watching the video, the following question is asked – “If they drag and drop straight off of Google, the metadata is lost. … it seems that Google has dumbed down the photograph so it doesn’t contain our metadata.” Which is very true. Naughty Google stripping my information and creating orphan works. What will your lawyers think about that?
When pressed for what they would do about it …”… A user that is informed and provided that metadata and a way to find the imagery in a way will not hurt your copyright is important to us, we want to improve in that area. We are not there today obviously … it’s going to be baby steps because it is a hard problem, its not just a people problem but it is also a technical problem.”
No. It’s not a hard technical or people problem.
Technically, just make the thumbnails you render include basic copyright information from the original image so that anyone that drags the file off the Google search can look into the file and see who owns the rights. Jeez, the XMP SDK has been open source for how many years now??
Socially, more easily accessible information will help keep honest people honest. Earlier in the video Zitzman almost rationalized the Google metadata stripping situation as an image consumer problem “…if they are not going to do the right thing in the long term, that is the problem“. Remember who your audience is – you need to see the image to think about licensing it. Surface the metadata in the image in the results page.
There will always be people who steal. That is not the problem to solve. The challenge is to raise the overall awareness of the ownership of the media, and educate the consumer on the right ways to re-use the media. Google could even be the hero by proactively adding metadata to thumbnails to link back to the webpage that it was posted on – how about that for service?
Technorati Tags: google, search, metadata, xmp, photography