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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? ;)
Here's the story without the signup restriction: http://archive.nytimes.com/2001/09/06/technology/c ircuits/06IMAG.html
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
Wouldn't that make ie/netscape/mozilla/opera/ect the program you are downloading with?
I can just see it now:
Judge shuts down microsoft for distubting software that allows you to violate copyrights by downloading images. Microsoft was shut down Monday for it's popular browser Internet Exploder. A representive from the company said "We were shocked. I mean, we didn't really expect the software to work in the first place."
Of course we won't see such a headline, but still, turnabout is fair play.
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Unix is very user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are.
I just started using IE's image toolbar, nice thing, i was on a site that tried to protect the images with javascript, i just clicked on image and the toolbar popped up, clicked save picture...
Is m$ breaking the DMCA with thier circumvention?
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;
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?
Fight Spammers!
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:
If you want to do this for multiple directories, you add on more Disallow lines:
User-agent: *
Disallow:
Disallow:
Now if you put
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):
User-agent: * /image
/image directory.
Disallow:
Put all image files in the
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.