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So Google UK is now allowed to use everyone's photographs (not just thumbnails) and use those photographs to sell ads next to it. How is that right ? It only a

by _k 13y ago

So Google UK is now allowed to use everyone's photographs (not just thumbnails) and use those photographs to sell ads next to it. How is that right ? It only applies to orphan works but you can easily and in an anonymous way strip out the metadata. And companies like Google could take it one step further. All they have to do is start a LLC in the UK for the Google image search part of its business, go to Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, ... take all the photos, strip the metadata, say it was someone else who must have done it, make a lot of money.

Silhouette 13y ago
So Google UK is now allowed to use everyone's photographs (not just thumbnails) and use those photographs to sell ads next to it. How is that right ? Google Image Search is already doing something awfully close to that, and the legality of doing so is surely going to be disputed in court sooner or later. They appear to be bandwidth leaching in a way that has been considered poor netiquette since forever, too. In fact, in an earlier court case in the US the fact that they weren't actually hosting the material themselves even though to a viewer it would look like they were was a key point for their defence.