Most of the descriptions generated for the images are likely generic and doesn't contain reference to the actual characters and names. I might explore incorporating some sort of more movie specific description in the metadata of the image to improve queries for specific characters.
Didn’t return what I expected: the scene from spirited away when chihiro and haku fall through the trap door.
Relevance can be improved with multiple ranking steps.
Kelly v. Arriba Soft Corp. (2003) and Perfect 10 v. Amazon (2007) are precedents for image search engines displaying thumbnails - they were found to be fair use. The function is transformative, the site is for a completely different use case than watching media, and doesn't harm the market.
If they've purchased the movies legitimately, and have the receipts, they have an incredibly strong fair use case. Because it's beneficial to Studio Ghibli, I'd say they are best served by allowing it and not trying to exploit DMCA mechanisms to get them taken down.
This is one of those areas where copyright holders can be assholes and abuse the system for petty wins, but the big tech companies have fought and won explicit precedent demonstrating the legitimacy of fair use cases for tools exactly like this.
Awesome tool!
While I'd also argue that this could be covered under a fair use defense, I thought it worth pointing out that buying a copy of a work and having receipts would have no bearing on the right to distribute copies of that work to others.
Obviously, if someone pirated these movies they could get in trouble for that as well, but that'd be an entirely different matter from the use of copyrighted images on their website.
If Studio Ghibli were to take them to court, they'd have to show that they had legal access to the media they're redistributing, namely the frames from the various movies. I believe that in this case they're using frames directly from the official Ghibli site, so there's no ambiguity, but if they purchased each and every movie they index, they'd have an extraordinarily strong case for fair use even without linking back to the studio site.