Getty Images and Microsoft step out of court and into a new partnership

Talk about a whirlwind!

In a period of seven months Getty Images & Microsoft have gone from being in court, to arriving at a settlement and now entering into a partnership to image rich experiences.

It all began back in September when Getty Images filed a federal lawsuit against Microsoft for what they described as massive infringement of their copyrighted images that were displayed on websites using the Bing Image Widget. 

According to GeekWire's story Getty Images charged that Microsoft “has turned the entirety of the world’s online images into little more than a vast, unlicensed ‘clip art’ collection for the benefit of those website publishers who implement the Bing Image Widget, all without seeking permission from the owners of the copyrights.”

Microsoft quickly pulled the widget from their site and likely started discussion with Getty Images to sort out the issue.

Then in April 2015 news came out that the two companies had settled their dispute over the widget and the misuse of Getty's copyrighted images. Getty had dropped the lawsuit and the companies announced they had agreed to bring Getty's vast photo collection to Bing and other Microsoft products and services.

Today Getty Images has revealed the plans for the two companies to help develop image-rich, compelling products and services for Microsoft products like Bing and Cortana using Getty Images.

According to the press release this partnership will develop over the coming years.

“With our new partnership, Microsoft will use Getty Images’ latest API innovations and our award-winning visual content to take search experiences to a new level,” Getty Images Senior Vice President of Business Development Craig Peters said. “Our technology teams will work together to create beautiful, engaging applications and services for Microsoft users with licensed content and attribution for photographers and other content creators.”

This would not be the first time that litigation has led to a partnership for Microsoft. It is believed they recently arrived at an agreement with Samsung to have Microsoft  apps and services installed on Samsung phones out of the box. This came about after the two companies settled a contract dispute concerning Android patent payments.

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