Survey on Google Images closing on 28 August

Have you taken ten minutes of your time to defend our industry?

CEPIC has been requested by the European Commission to send information on the use of Google Images. We have data from 79 agencies so far, from all across Europe.

What you should know

• The fact that the EU Commission has sent CEPIC an RFI (Request For Information) means that they take the issue seriously

•   Only the European Commission has the leverage to play an intermediary role between Google and the picture industry in its diversity.

• The news publishers who filled their own claim in 2011 have yet not received an RFI. CEPIC joined later. We got further.

Google represents 90% of search in the EU.

Picture agencies rely on traffic from Google.

search

What can be fixed?

Put in place technical measures which avoid piracy instead of encouraging piracy.

Make clear that images are a valuable product and not a freely-available-not-worth-anything product.

For example, by making sure that:
– the click of a thumbnail image leads directly to the source website (and not to Google’s domain as this is the case presently)
– low res. be indexed, not high res. images
– avoid hot linking
– avoid the scraping of metadata
– install a clear copyright notice
– install effective protection measures without banning images and websites from the first page (as the robots.txt presently do)
 

The survey will close on 28 August.

Act now.

 

The text of the survey is available in the Login Area of the CEPIC website. Alternatively, send a short message to Sylvie at CEPIC who will send you the link!