Removing Your Images from Image Search
If you're an artist or photographer, you might find that your copyrighted images are appearing in Google Image Search. This might be okay with you, or it might not. If you'd prefer that your images not be displayed in Google Image Search, you can request Google remove them.
To remove a copyrighted image from Google Image Search, you have to add a special text file to the root directory of your website. This file should be labeled robots.txt, and needs to include specific information about the images you want to protect.
If you want to remove a specific image file from the Google search index, add the following lines to the robots.txt file:
User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow: /subdirctory/file.jpg
Naturally, replace subdirectory with the name of the subdirectory where the image file is located, and replace file.jpg with the name and extension of the file you want to protect.
Alternately, you can instruct Google to remove all images on your site from the Google search index. In this instance, you want to add the following lines to the robots.txt file:
User-agent: Googlebot-Image<
Disallow: /
When the GoogleBot spider crawls your site, it automatically reads the content of the robots.txt file for instructions. If your site includes a robots.txt file, the spider will follow the instructions you specify, and not add the image file(s) you noted.
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On February 17, 2006, a Los Angeles federal judge ruled that Google Image Search violated the copyrights held by an adult website, by displaying thumbnail versions of copyrighted photos.
The Perfect 10 website (www.perfect10.com) had sued Google over use of the photos in Google's search results. The site claimedand the judge agreedthat the free availability of the photos on Google Image Search, even in thumbnail form, could harm Perfect 10's ability to sell small versions of its photos as downloads to cell phones.
The judge ruled that Google's creation and display of the Perfect 10 thumbnail images "likely do not fall within the fair use exemption." Fair use, for those of you unschooled in copyright law, is the legal standard that allows for limited use of copyrighted works for specific purposes, such as news reporting, criticism, or comment.
Google, obviously, disagreed. The company pointed out that it doesn't display full-sized versions of the photos in question; when a user clicks a thumbnail image, he leaves Google and is taken to the Perfect 10 website. For these purposes, Google argued that display of thumbnail images is fair use.
While I'm all for artist's rights, it seems to me that the display of thumbnail images for navigational purposes doesn't do anyone any harm. If Google were displaying the full-sized images without permission, that would be another thing. But displaying thumbnails is what makes Google Image Search particularly useful, and I'd wager that having Perfect 10's photos listed in Google's search results drives a lot of traffic to the (paid) Perfect 10 site. By forcing Google to remove thumbnails of their images, Perfect 10 is likely to see a decrease in trafficwhich is a "cut off your nose to spite your face" sort of scenario.
Google is appealing this ruling, and hope they win on appeal. If other websites force Google to remove their thumbnail images from its search results, it will negatively affect the usability of Google Image Search. The fewer images you can see, the less useful Image Search will be.
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