Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Image Detecting Search Engines' Legal Fight Continues

Posted by timothy on from the mmmm-thumbnails dept.

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? ;)

3 of 220 comments (clear)

  1. well... by fjordboy · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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
  2. robots.txt by mj6798 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  3. There is a very simple answer by graveyhead · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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;