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Comment by anonytrary | Hacker News Reader

I remember that, and I am a still a tiny bit salty about how it impacted me as a user. Ever since, it has been so unnecessarily tedious get the raw image link from Google. Half the time, I end up with a data url, sometimes I get taken to the backing website, who usually don't know anything about accessibility, sometimes I get the image. It's all just so much worse now.

That said, it is absolutely theft for Google to source data from your site, then use that to add value to their site, without giving you any click-through traffic.

Tangentially, it would be great if Google sent like $1 (edit: or < $1; the amount isn't my point) per 1000 clicks out to websites whose search results get clicked. They already have an ad-engine that does all of this. This would mean that you would get paid to have good SEO, or to be a central hub. The websites that comprise the entire web should negotiate better terms with central data brokers like Google.

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> That said, it is absolutely theft for Google to source data from your site, then use that to add value to their site, without giving you any click-through traffic.

Would you be OK, if Google didn't show images from your site on their site? If so, I believe a simple robots.txt statement should be sufficient.

> This would mean that you would get paid to have good SEO, or to be a central hub. The websites that comprise the entire web should negotiate better terms with central data brokers like Google.

I don't really get the logic by which someone letting people find you, should pay for that privilege.

(have not used Google search in a long time)

> Would you be OK, if Google didn't show images from your site on their site? If so, I believe a simple robots.txt statement should be sufficient.

Giving people a way to opt out doesn't absolve Google. They need to get permission to use the property of others, not default to using it unless told not to.

They're acting as if everything that isn't locked up, and doesn't have a note on it saying otherwise, is free for anyone to borrow.

> I don't really get the logic by which someone letting people find you, should pay for that privilege.

Google can let people find sites without copying the content of those sites.

In fact, when Google copies your content, people are less likely to go to your site, the very opposite of "letting people find you".

Letting Google crawl your page and not telling it to stop via robots.txt is implied consent, and a german court case confirmed this[0].

0: https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/german-federal-court-rules...

That's not what that article says. According to that article, that decision was based on the idea that a hyperlink cannot infringe copyright, not on implied consent:

> The court in Karlsruhe does not regard the display of the preview images as an act of making available a copyright work in the sense of the copyright law. ... Since the decision handed down in the “Svensson” case in 2014, it is common ground that, in principle, the use of a hyperlink is not a copyright-relevant act.

My bad - I was looking at a published book that referenced the case and wanted to link an article that was more easily available, but it was for the wrong case. My original comment is also uneditable now. The case I meant to reference is "Vorschaubilder I", see the press release[0]

> [translated] The plaintiff has made the content of its website accessible for search engines without making use of technical means to exclude the images of her works from the search and display by image search engines in the form of preview images.

0: http://juris.bundesgerichtshof.de/cgi-bin/rechtsprechung/doc...

Offtopic:

I am using entry page that brute forces password for accessing other pages. It takes a 30 seconds max on phone, but will raise cpu to 100%. Later it is stored to cookie. I havent seen any crawler get past that.

> I don't really get the logic by which someone letting people find you, should pay for that privilege. Images ends up being more of a media platform than search engine. I'm rarely looking for a site. Doesn't seem too weird that they could pay for some of the content

I don't really understand. Are you saying Google is creating a media platform based on image search and they should somehow find a way to pay for the images in it?

If you want to use an image that is not free, you should go pay for it, no? You have a link for the site. You can even go visit the site as a courtesy for free images. Are you saying Google should be paying for the images?

If you want to be mad at someone, look at getty - they take² people's images and charge for them, even managing to file DMCA takedowns on the author[1]. As a consolation, at least they host the images themselves.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12180039

² Quick skim says they may merely let other people do the uploading of effectively stolen images.

I have a website with over 1.000.000 pictures. I’m still a bit salty that my images get 1M monthly impressions in image search and just 15k visitors.

If I made a website like Image Search, hotlinked all the images and burried a visit website button somewhere as a ‘curtesy’, I’d be sued out of existence within a couple of weeks.

Do you think you'd get more than 15k visitors if the image wasn't on google images as all?

No. But that’s a strawman argument. Their conduct is not suddenly OK if they’re tossing some visitors my way.

$1 per 1000 clicks is ridiculous. Google make a lot of money, but that's because of their scale, not because they have somehow made search a miracle source of income. Would you also argue that, say, indexes of literature or libraries should pay the authors money per item viewed, because the data isn't "theirs"?

Paying websites with good SEO would make filtering out abusers of search engines (no meaningful content, scraping other websites and republishing, clickbait...) even harder, as there would now be a direct ROI on SEO.

> Would you also argue that, say, indexes of literature or libraries should pay the authors money per item viewed, because the data isn't "theirs"?

At least someone has to pay for the book to be in a library.

Yes, because the author didn't make its contents available for free. Websites can do the same, and many do. They could even disallow other sites from crawling them and processing their contents through the (mostly) respected robots.txt. But publishing something for free, not forbidding crawling through well-understood mechanisms, and then demanding payment is ridiculous.

Libraries do have to get special non-consumer licenses for electronic books. Typically they pay several times more than a the retail ebook cost for a library license that lasts the lesser of two years or ~50 views before expiry.

There are browser extensions that add a link to the original image.

You think that's bad, see AMP

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