Microsoft, its agents and partners created the IconicBritain competition to promote LiveSearch, its images search engine, designed to compete with Google Image Search. Visitors vote on images that they believe are British icons and some win cameras. Unusually visitors are asked to submit representative photographs from a LiveSearch query and are not allowed to submit their own so photographers get nothing.
Copyright Protection
The UK Intellectual Property Office states: “...This means that you must not reproduce copyright protected work in another medium without permission. This includes, publishing photographs on the internet, ...”. Most industrial nations are signatories to the Berne Convention and will adopt a similar view of copyright.
Microsoft are publishing photographs on the internet without the copyright holders permission and the possible scale could run into millions of images worldwide.
Passing the Buck
The competition terms and conditions warn those submitting the images they find may be copyright (all images are but a few may have had it assigned for wider use) and they must ensure that they are not infringing the copyright holders rights. Unfortunately Microsoft has seen fit to remove all reference data, copyright notices, and links to the original source that could give someone chance to make that check. In any case the harm has been done as Microsoft published the images for their own commercial benefit when it presented them on their web site.
This part of the site does not work as is accepted for a search engine; there are no links or references to the originator; there is a separate LiveSearch box that does.
No doubt there will be argument amongst copyright lawyers but many photographers and other bodies see this as copyright infringement.
Why did they do it?
Bill Gates owns a major photolibrary, Corbis who could have provided images. They could also have bought them inexpensively from the microstock sites or even searched those images that are genuinely in the public domain.
No doubt Microsoft wanted to show the capability of LiveSearch so have trawled far and wide across the internet pulling images from commercial web sites, private (possibly very personal) pages and anywhere else LiveSearch robots wandered. They have pulled them off PhotoShelter, Alamy, possibly Getty and many individual photographers commercial sites. These all have extensive copyright notices and are there to allow image makers to make a living, as entitled, from their copyright work; Microsoft do the same.
Competitions watchdog
Pro-imaging is a professional body which monitors competitions and highligh abusive rules; usually those that grab all rights. They are on this case and it seems Nikon have withdrawn their involvement . As Pro-Imaging say: “We thought in the last few months we had seen every possible way to make contest rules unfair, but to enable an act which may result in legal action is not something we would ever have dreamt of finding.”. Pro-Imaging provides wide coverage and advice.
Compounding the Problem
Microsoft say in their reply to Pro-Imaging: “All images that feature on www.iconicbritain.co.uk are images from the internet that are already in the public domain.” But all images on the internet are not in the public domain, as most image sites and the UK IP Office make clear. Microsoft with some of the best intellectual property lawyers in the world should not be propagating such a fallacy – especially when they protect their own rights so vigorously.
At best this was mistake and one hopes not a premeditated act to create a pool of millions of orphan images for commercial gain. Time will tell how this plays out.
Mark your images
The importance of marking images with contact and copyright details was covered recently on Suite101.
Martin P Wilson - Martin is a director of major business change & turnaround consultant by profession but a widely published writer & photographer by ...
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