Getty Images fires lawsuit at Microsoft for ‘massive’ copyright infringement

Microsoft has pulled a new tool from its Bing service after being accused of “massive infringement” of copyrighted photographs. The Bing Image Widget lets bloggers and other online publishers embed collages and slideshows onto their websites based on search results. But on Thursday, Getty Images filed a lawsuit in New York alleging the “beautiful, configurable image galleries and slideshows” contained copyrighted images. It demanded that the widget be removed and asked for unspecified damages.

Rather than draw from a licensed collection of images, defendant gathers these images by crawling as much of the Internet as it can, copying and indexing every image it finds, without regard to the copyright status of the images and without permission from copyright owners like plaintiff.

Legal papers filed by Getty

By Monday, Microsoft had an announcement on its Bing website saying the feature—which was still in beta testing—had been “temporarily removed”. The company said: “As a copyright owner ourselves, we think the laws in this area are important. We’ll take a close look at Getty’s concerns.” The tool was launched late last month and markets to website publishers as a way to enhance how their sites look.

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