It will now be easier to get licenses for copyrighted photographs on Google. The company says a new update on Google images will help publishers, photographers and artists stay ahead of their audience while helping them find images they are licensed to use.
Publishers who provide their licensing information will henceforth have their images appearing on the search results with a ‘licensable’ badge on the thumbnail. To make things easy, once you click on the image, all the licensing information and requirements will be displayed.
There will also be a link that redirects you to a page where you can buy the image, if you want to. Licensers will be able to specify a purchasing link, which will be different from page where the image originated from. For example, if a photo appeared on the results, from kahawatungu.com, you will be redirected to a different URL should you decide to purchase the image.
The new update will also filter images search results based on the type of license attached to it. That means you can also use the same criteria to search. You can specify that you want strictly commercial images or search for images with less strict licensing requirements.
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Google reports that it arrived at the new update after working with the imaging licensing industry.
“We believe this is a step towards helping people better understand the nature of the content they’re looking at on Google Images and how they can use it responsibly,” Google said in a blog post.
“Google Images’ new features help both image creators and image consumers by bringing visibility to how creators’ content can be licensed properly,” Shutterstock’s Vice President of content operations Paul Brennan said. “We are pleased to have worked closely with Google on this feature, by advocating for protections that result in fair compensation for our global community of over one million contributors. In developing this feature, Google has clearly demonstrated its commitment to supporting the content creation ecosystem.”
Initially, Google images captured a vast collection of images across the web, were easily accessible and had less restrictions for users. However, copyright owners said that stealing images was too easy and since then, Google has made a few changes to protect copyrighted images.
A while back, the company removed the button that allowed users to view the full image on the search results, and instead redirects to the website where the image was uploaded from.
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