Getty Images spider?

[Stu_Rogers]

Is anyone aware of Getty Images running a spider to track images?

Found a thread from 2003 suggesting it is true (forum11/2209.htm), but can anyone confirm this is still active. If so, how do they use the information from this spider?

[Stu_Rogers]

Replying to my own thread with some info that might be useful to anyone who finds this in the future.

I have discovered that Getty use a company called Picscout. Their powerful image recognition tool crawls the web, downloading images and comparing them to images held in the Getty database. If you have unlicensed images on your site, you will be getting a big bill in the post soon.

[volatilegx]

Thanks for that info, Stu.

[incrediBILL]

They won't catch me, you have to crawl the site first :)

[vincevincevince]

I can't find anything out about their user agent or blocking them by robots.txt

Does anyone have an IP range for them?

I don't have any of their pictures but I don't want to waste money on bandwidth just to prove it to them.