Getty Images has filed a lawsuit against Microsoft claiming that the new Bing Image Widget tool is violating “massive infringement” of copyrighted images. The Bing “Image Widget” launched a few weeks ago in beta.
Getty Images asked a U.S. District Court judge to rule in their favor in having the widget shut down and award the company unspecified damages.
The Bing Image Widget lets users easily embed an active slideshow or a grid of image search results on their websites.
Getty Images recently launched a tool that lets users embed photos from their collection onto personal blogs and websites. The embedded photos link to a purchase page on Getty Images.
“As a copyright owner ourselves we think the laws in this area are important,” said Microsoft in a statement to Reuters. “We’ll take a close look at Getty’s concerns.”
Microsoft disabled the Bing Image Widget while dealing with this issue. All of the help pages referring to the service have been removed too.
