Why not just remove the feature for pictures from Getty then, or simply not show their pictures at all? Surely that is within the technical capability of Google.

Presumably because others could now sue Google for the same reasons, and they would be even more likely to win given the Getty result.

This. Otherwise known as "legal precedent".

Settlements don't establish precedent.

Ah, good point, it was a settlement...

Because then every other company would file similar suite and Google would have to deal with all of them.

Do you think every image company would want to be removed from Google Search results instead of building their services without the ability to scrape the big resolution images? How would users get on their websites?

It doesn't matter. Once one company wins in court, it sets a precedent. It attracts more companies to follow the same path as they'll think they have a better shot at winning. Google obviously wouldn't risk this.

But the question is what would they be winning? Fewer users because they are now off the search-grid.

Why would they want that?

> what would they be winning?

Money from a successful lawsuit?

Believe it or not there are people who just enjoy suing corporations or governments.

Lawyers are not cheap and frankly Google would lose every case because they are in the wrong.

Why are they in the wrong (on this issue)?

It was a settlement, there is no precedent.

Users don't go to the websites at all if the images are scraped by Google.

Because Getty wasn't suing to stop Google from sharing Getty images in image search. They were suing because they felt coerced into participating in image search. Forcing Getty not to participate would have been even worse for Getty.

Google should have just delisted Getty images from all of their search.

Then Google would have been sued for monopoly abuse, in Europe at least.

Even if it was with Getty's blessing?

The feature is still available on Bing Images, for now: http://www.bing.com/images/

Looks like Getty and Microsoft have had an agreement for a couple of years now https://searchengineland.com/microsoft-getty-images-announce...

I don’t believe that this is the sole motivator. As others have said, they could remove this for Getty images only (based on domain, based on reverse image search, lots of ways). But also, this seems like an absurd judgement, that if true they would want to highlight how the judgement had a very specific design fix as part of the settlement.

Since Google isn’t highlighting any such absurd ruling’s specific language then there must be some other reason.

>...there must be some other reason.

If Getty can successful sue them, then any image rights holder can do so. Making an exception for Getty images doesn't resolve the underlying general liability or infringement. That means if another rights holder were to sue them for not addressing that liability for their images, now Google are infringing wilfully and subject to punitively increased sanctions or damages. That's reason enough to apply this remedy across the board.

YouTube and many other sites have systems to work with rightsholders. It would be trivial for Google to allow Getty and others to manage their images that show up while still retaining functionality for the billions of images created by people who don’t care or who even explicitly allow Creative Commons usage.

Thus my suspicion. What’s a little sad is 15 years ago I would give Google the benefit of the doubt, but this reminds me how times have changed.

YouTube, where a user chooses to upload content and Google defines the platform features and standards, is pretty different to search.

‘Still retaining functionality’ would require assuming permissive access to images as the default, which is what has got a Google into this mess in the first place. The whole point of this is that, for sites and rights holders that don’t explicitly allow access, Google cannot assume they grant it. They have to assume the most restrictive grant of rights, and adoption of metadata to indicate more permissive access is so poorly adopted it’s just irrelevant in practice.

> They have to assume the most restrictive grant of rights, and adoption of metadata to indicate more permissive access is so poorly adopted it’s just irrelevant in practice.

Try the advanced image search options, just like many other modern image search engines, as a user, you can filter for permissive licenses. I'm not sure how they gather that metadata, but the results I'm getting, it's not poorly adopted at all.

So they could in fact retain the functionality for images with the right license.

I think Google prefers to minimize the: "if this domain, and only this domain, do this special thing". Like you said, given that it would be absurd to remove a UI element based on some whim that it'd put them in compliance, I'm sure a major element of the plaintiff's litigation case hinged on this very feature.

They have many cases of this. They actively filter based on domain to comply with takedown notices. That’s the most public example of how they have a huge number of exceptions based on domain and file.

Of course, I’m sure they do this in an intelligent way rather than literally a bunch of one off kludges.

Maybe completely ignoring a domain is different than a implementing subroutine that ignores indexing a domain's images but not its other (text-based) content?