Hello everyone,

My name is Ophir, and I created the zoomable image downloader dezoomify several years ago, while I was still in high school. I have been maintaining dezoomify as a free and opensource software since, regularly improving it, adding support for new zoomable image formats, and answering questions from the ever larger user base.

In 2019, with the help of other contributors, I figured out how the zoomable image protocol behind Google Arts and Culture worked. This protocol is substantially more complicated than most others, and I was very proud to implement it in dezoomify, but also in dezoomify-rs and gapdecoder. Many of the high-resolution digitized artworks available on google arts and culture are from artists whose rights over the works have long expired, and are thus in the public domain. Adding support for this site on dezoomify let users fully benefit from their right to archive and share these public domain works.

Last week, I received the following email from google :

From: XXX xxx@google.com
Date: Tue, 4 Aug 2020 10:42:51 +0200
Subject: Request to remove content
To: contact @ ophir . dev
Dear Mr L[...],

We recently noticed that services that you offer on your site use content
directly from Google Arts & Culture. You are using our name without
permission and violating the Google Arts & Culture Terms of Service
(available at http://www.google.com/intl/en/policies/terms). You are also
using content from our museum partners without permission.

Your use directly jeopardizes Google's ability to make cultural works
available to the world. As such, we would appreciate your voluntarily
removing this content.

If you have any questions, or if we have contacted the wrong people, please
feel free to contact me directly. Otherwise, please let us know as soon as
possible when this content has been removed.

Sincerely,

M[...]

I asked for more details, initially hoping they may be after some actual copyrighted artworks that I would have uploaded by accident. They are not, and they do actually want me to shut down dezoomify, or at least the ability to download google arts and culture artworks from it. They also want me to stop using the Google Arts & Culture brand.

I am a software engineer, and have very little legal experience. I would hate to have a lawsuit filed against me, especially by google. But on the other hand, I feel like they have very little rights over dezoomify: if someone is infringing their terms of use, it's dezoomify's users, not me. And the use of the terms Google Arts & Culture on dezoomify.ophir.dev seems legal to me, as it doesn't mislead anyone into thinking that dezoomify actually is Google Arts.

As I find myself in a difficult situation, I am kindly asking you for advice. Should I remove the ability to download google art images from dezoomify ? What should I answer to google ? Would they win a lawsuit against me (I am located in France) ?