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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? ;)
my site (Peterswift.org is cached on google and they have my images and pretty much everything i have on my site on their site. However, this doesn't bother me at all. They don't claim ownership to any of it, in fact, they blatantly say that they don't own any of it! I don't have a problem with them taking my page and putting it on their site. That just means more people access my page, and if my site ever happens to be down, then I don't have to worry as much. In fact..I hope google caches my site today, because I just uploaded about 40 or 50 images in the last week in my pictures folder, and if they cache it, then i don't have to worry about me screwing up html or anything...i can always pull my site from google. it is just another backup. :)
The anti-salmon
The guy's site (http://www.goldrush1849.com/) still does not have a robots.txt file. Either Kelly is incompetent, or he does this deliberately to get other people to trick other people into "using" his content and sue them later.
There is a very simple answer for the artist in the ditto.com case. Watermark all your production images. You can create yourself a Photoshop action to automate this very easily, and a GIMP script version wouldn't be all that tough either. Make them unusable unless they obtain a (non-web based) copy from you. I couldn't even finish reading the horrible article because they compared the pitiful ditto.com vs nobody case to Napster vs. RIAA twice before the article was half-finished.
std::disclaimer<std::legalese> sig=new std::disclaimer; sig->dump(); delete sig;
I mean, don't we suffer from exactly the same problems with all text that's online? Google caches it all for Pete's sake! Isn't that making a copy? Isn't that making it easier to find? Aren't these exactly the same complaints people are making about the images?
Authors are losing control over their works which can be easily found and copied now they they're catelogued by search engines! Outrage!
But is it the Right Thing to ban or penalize this?
These are exactly the types of problems that we're coming up against now that copyright has been deemed a control mechanism. We've gone and screwed up the whole system to the point where it's going to be virtually unusable.
But personally, I just want to know who I can sue for "copying" text and images from my site when they visit it. I need the money.
I spend much time and effort on my graphics. For me it is a form of art. When I see one of my Backgrounds on a coworkers system, I am tickeled pink. I would like to make money at this someday. The more my work spreads, the easier it will be to sell my services. As for downloading and distributing my backgrounds as art theft, get real. The only valuable item is the 16 to 30 layer 1600X1200 gimp file and all the variouse auxillary files I used to generate the 1024X786 .png. It is just like photograph. It is'nt the print, but the negative that is important, despite what some anal Photo trade organizations are pushing for.
>>The issue is about a company that saves your image and redistributes it while possibly making profits on banner ads, etc
If Google makes money with banner ads, that doesn't really have anything to do with posting thumbnails of images. They AREN'T making money from the images. They are providing a FREE service pointing out where to find these images. If the artist doesn't want visitors to his site, I don't know why he has a web page. If he does want visitors, I don't know why he has a problem with a search engine pointing people his direction.
Don't just complain - DO something about it!
Imagine a world in which there are no search engines impartially indexing the web. You'd end up with a few popular outlets that would either showcase their own subsidiaries or sell listings to their partners.
Bing! You have reinvented TV, but with online ordering capabilities. Having failed to create interactive television, Big Business is systematically destroying those elements of the web that made it better than interactive TV.
Your spoonfeeding, already in progress, will now resume.
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