Google: Video conference on 11 December 2017

On 11.12.2017, the German group - BVPA led Google Images intiative - had a video conference with Google.

Attached are the minutes of this meeting by Mathias Jahn, who is leading the German initiative. (The minutes will also be valuable to non-German speakers as they include screenshots of what Google showed us yesterday.)

Protokoll_Videokonferenz_Google_Bildersuche_Zwischenbericht_2017-12-12

Participants:

Google

• Luca Forlin - EMEA Partnerships for News, Publishing and Search
• Georg Nolte - Germany Legal

Associations Initiative
• Sylvie Fodor (CEPIC)
• Michael Steidl (IPTC)
• David Seiler (BVPA)
• Mathias Jahn (BVPA)

Luca Forlin, EMEA partnerships for News, Publishing and Search at Google, had proposed to "to follow up from the meeting we had in early October to share updates on our thinking about metadata" and "to share progress."

Google showed novelties that had just been started being rolled out. These novelties "Image Overlay" and "Image Context" provide information to images when search for.  With these new features, it is also easier to share and save images.

Google argues that better contextualisation of the image is good for "source and content". They also say that sharing of images leads to more web traffic by content providers.

They refute the idea that Sharing fuels piracy or is a "un-authorized act" in itself. Rather, image providers should rejoice that the links shared on social media lead back to Google Images (see example below) as Google Images ultimately references back to the source website. In the old way, images had to be downloaded, stored on a laptop before being up-loaded again in order to be shared so that the reference to the source website being definitly lost.

Example:

After showing us these new features, they addressed the issue of metadata.

They are at stage 1 on metadata, wondering which field should they chose in IPTC "Authors/ Creators" or "Rightsholders"? They also said that the problem was that not all photos were providing this information. David Seiler and Michael Steidl provided some feedback on this.

Personal feeling:

It is difficult not to have mixed feelings after this meeting and/or not be sarcastic.

Google says they want the feedback from the image industry but:

• They ask feedback on products/ features that have already been developed and have started being rolled out
• These new features use images without authorization to enhance "user's experience" i.e. Google's product
• They discard any argument on our side as irrelevant and/or develop a jesuistic argumentation to prove that what they are doing is good for us.
• They did not address any of the points we raised in May and in October. Notably: drop of traffic on website, Share button, storage of pictures
• They say they will definitely not go back to the old version of Google Images

What's next?

Another meeting is planned in Paris on the 14th at Google's headquarters with a French group led by the Group Le Figaro but Google seems to keep these meetings separate and unrelated.

sf