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ImageLogr Scrapes "Billions" of Images Illegally
PurpleCarrot writes "In what must be one of the largest attempts to scrape images from the Web, the site ImageLogr.com 'claims to be scraping the entire "free web" and seems to have hit Flickr especially hard, copying full-sized images of yours and mine to their own servers, where they are hosting them without any attribution or links back to the original image in violation of all available licenses on Flickr.' The site even contains the option to directly download images that ImageLogr has scraped. What makes this endeavor so amazing is that it isn't a case of 'other people gave us millions of infringing images, help us remove the wrong ones,' but one of 'we took all the images on the Web; if we got one of yours, oops!' The former gets some protection from the DMCA, whereas the latter is blatant infringement. ImageLogr's actions have caused a flurry of activity, and the site's owners have subsequently taken it offline, displaying the following message: 'Imagelogr.com is currently offline as we are improving the website. Due to copyright issues we are now changing some stuff around to make people happy. Please check back soon.'"
That, and Google respects robots.txt (or at least says they do, and I'm sure someone has been watchdogging them on it).
It's useful to have an archive. After five or ten years people won't care about these images any more, and won't have a problem with someone archiving them. Unfortunately, the next five or ten years are the period when these images will actually be available. It doesn't really make sense to wait until flickr doesn't exist anymore to mirror its content.
And come on people, try to think outside of the current month. How ridiculous is it going to look in 20 years that content creators protect their images into extinction because of some by-attribution pissing contest of egos? We should be mirroring everything far and wide; protecting our society's creative output from annoying little people who don't cite sources looks preposterous next to protecting our creative output from disappearing off the face of the earth and being unavailable to our children.
Already people are kicking themselves for allowing content to be destroyed. A large number of silent movies (remember, the silent movie era stretched across decades) are completely lost today; not a single copy exists in the entire world. This is a critical part of our culture for film historians.
The amazing part is how someone gets enough storage space to store every image on the web.
That sounds expensive to me.
Yes, but this leaves out two important factors:
1) People who don't infringe media copyrights but post pictures to Facebook et al. Not a vanishing minority, btw.
2) People who infringe media copyrights, post pictures, and don't see it as hypocritical for any number of fractionally-assed reasons (or shallow rationales, if you wish).
The former category, you are obviously not addressing. So either you lack sympathy for them for some other unspecified reason, or don't care about them because their existence doesn't support the logic of your assertion. In the latter case, they're precisely what you're talking about, but they don't think they do. And denial is a powerful force.
Hell, a truly rational observer would conclude that hypocrisy might not be bad; that, in fact, it's an absolute requirement for social interaction. If you can act politely to someone you'd just as soon strangle, that's a mild (and socially necessary) form of hypocrisy.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
The site is gone, and this explains why:
http://www.domainlogr.com/imagelogr.php
They were bullsh*tting everyone, almost daydreaming. Nothing was there, nothing was probably going to be there, they apparently didn't have anything like the resources for that sort of archiving.
They got caught in their bullsh*t, and chickened out. Bidda boom.