Microsoft to Replace Clip Art With Filtered Bing Image Search

Microsoft will soon get rid of its old Clip Art images as the firm has announced it will replace the iconic images with Bing's much updated Image Search. Microsoft used its Clip Art images in office products like Word, PowerPoint and more.

The Redmond giant announced the replacement of Clip Art with Bing Images via an Office blog post (via The Verge), which has now been removed from the website.

"The Office.com Clip Art and image library has closed shop," said Microsoft's Doug Thomas on the blog post before it was removed. "Usage of Office's image library has been declining year-to-year as customers rely more on search engines."

The new and modern Bing Images will not be the same vector images and won't be as resizable as the Clip Art images, which are iconic of the 90s. However, the Redmond-based tech giant's Office products will automatically filter the images thrown up by Bing Image Search and only show those pictures that fall under Creative Commons licence for personal or commercial use.

In September, Getty Images claimed in a lawsuit filed in federal court in New York claiming that Microsoft's Bing Image Widget allowed website publishers to embed Getty's digital photographs on their sites, and called it a "massive infringement" of copyrighted images. Getty owns or represents the owners of more than 80 million digital images.

However, in October, Getty Images failed to convince the federal judge to halt Microsoft Corp's Bing Image Widget because the software company had already taken it down voluntarily.

Microsoft told Getty during the lawsuit that if it did launch a similar product in the future, it would include "search filters, attribution notices" and other details important to copyright.

Written with agency inputs.