The astounding thing about this case is how little due diligence Getty and AFP did. In my capacity as a Wikipedia admin, I've handled copyright-related issues w

The astounding thing about this case is how little due diligence Getty and AFP did. In my capacity as a Wikipedia admin, I've handled copyright-related issues with images and text. We put an enormous amount of volunteer labour into tracking copyright violations and removing them: if a photographer complains that someone has uploaded a copyright violation, our volunteers will go and forensically examine EXIF data, look at upload metadata on sites like Flickr, check for digital watermarks, check on Google Images and other search tools to try and trace the upload history of the image. And even after all that work, it still feels like it's not quite good enough. On image licensing, I've emailed government lawyers to verify that our interpretation of their national copyright policies is correct. Meanwhile, I've worked with people in the commercial sector whose modus operandi for producing social media campaigns is "open up Google Images/Flickr/YouTube and pinch all the things!" If I can trace the copyright claims on an image by using tools like Google Image Search, so can AFP and Getty. Not just for copyright purposes, but due diligence to make sure the metadata checks out with the photojournalistic claim made of the image. That they aren't doing so ought to give one pause before trusting agencies like AFP to report the news.