Image Detecting Search Engines' Legal Fight Continues

Mr. steve points to this New York Times article about sites like ditto.com and the new google image-search engine, writing: "Search engines that corral images are raising Napsteresque copyright issues." Expect to see a lot more sites with prominent copying policies and "no-download" images, and trivial circumvention of both. If an image is part of your site's design, you wouldn't truly want to prevent downloads, would you? ;)

Comments

Don't sign up for NYTimes:

[cavemanf16]

Here's the story without the signup restriction: http://archive.nytimes.com/2001/09/06/technology/c ircuits/06IMAG.html

Next step....

[www.sorehands.com]

What about the companies that build databses of images, websites, etc. from spidering the web?

They sell access to these databases to their clients to search for illegal copies of their works, or to see any mention of them in an unfavorable light. Is this an infringement?

Especially since robots.txt lets you disallow this

[MemeRot]

A little thing called robots.txt - look it up here or here if you don't know what it is.

Allows really useful features like marking given directories, pages, or files off-limits to a specific robot or all robots in general. Boy... a technical solution to a technical problem? Who'd a thunk it?

Quickie examples (this is SO simple folks):
User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Boom! No more google telling that horrible world of pirates and thieves about your site. Not many visitors either though....

So maybe you want to exclude just googlebot from your images and image directory with the following:

User-agent: googlebot
Disallow: /image

If you want to do this for multiple directories, you add on more Disallow lines:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /image
Disallow: /cgi-bin/

Now if you put

meta name="robots" content="All,INDEX"
meta name="revisit-after" content="5 days"

in your code to show up high on the search engines, you shouldn't be surprised or upset when you SHOW UP HIGH ON THE SEARCH ENGINES.

Not all robots follow the robots.txt standard, and there's no way of forcing them too. But google does, and that seems to be the big concern here.

A real life example, slashdot's robot.txt file (at slashdot.org/robots.txt):

# robots.txt for Slashdot.org
User-agent: *
Disallow: /index.pl
Disallow: /article.pl
Disallow: /comments.pl
Disallow: /users.pl
Disallow: /search.pl
Disallow: /palm
Disallow: index.pl
Disallow: article.pl
Disallow: comments.pl
Disallow: users.pl
Disallow: search.pl

Do you have any idea how robots.txt works?

[MemeRot]

User-agent: *
Disallow: /image
Put all image files in the /image directory.

or I would recommend for him:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
- i don't think he has any 'right' to use the search sites to promote his site if he doesn't consent to them copying his data. Is html code protected by copyright? This would make all search sites illegal, and destroy the internet as a usable resource. So because the consequences would be untenable, we should answer no.

That's all. Meta tags, which you seem to be thinking of, are a pain in the ass, poorly supported, and only worth using if you don't control the domain and can't put up your own robots.txt file.

If I put 10 pizzas on a picnic table with a note saying 'please dont eat my pizza' and leave it there for 3 days - it will be eaten. If I do this ignoring the safe that's right there that I could use to lock them in, then i'm an idiot.