Geniuses at work
Did you catch this one:
http://similar-images.googlelabs.com/
They seem to have some genius ideas men in the chocolate factory for all the umpa lumpa chides.
Mountain View has added a filter to its Google Images to allow users to sift through photos to determine the usage rights of the image. New options are now available via Google's image search tool that include a selection of licensing methods, such as Creative Commons and GNU Free Documentation, for the reuse of photographs. …
Not really, the similar-images stuff is pretty useless since it only applies to images of famous people, places or objects, most of which could have been found simply through normal keyword searches. Head off the beaten track and those 'similar images' links vanish.
It's not really clear that they are doing the matching on photo content at all, the results seem more like the result of image naming/context or metadata, hardly impressive.
wait im liking this, is this how google is really ran?
a google employee brings his car to your garage: well sir, we fixed your car, I mean we may have fixed it, well I can't guarantee that we fixed it, it might be fixed, well we took the first step in fixing it.
How stupid is this, Googles lawyers seem to have a little too much time on their hands. If google can't provide a functional service what's the point of providing one at all. How large can this company get until someone with a Roosevelt mindset comes along, yanks these google plants out of our government and puts the hammer down.
"You'll still have to verify that the licensing information is accurate,"
Sadly a lot of companies still fail to do this. They filter for Creative Commons and just assume that gives them full rights to use them commercially. Nor do they realise that just because it's CC does not mean they have been assigned copyright. That still resides with the original creator.
But then a lot also don't give a crap at all and assume if it's on the net, even if it's All Rights Reserved, it's free for use. Trying to chase up copyright infringement is extremely difficult too.
Crap analogy, with the car.
I don't see how much more accurate they could be than by reading the info embedded in the image itself. Sure, if there is nothing there, it doesn't mean much, and if it is there it could have been altered after publishing, but for a company anything like the size of Google, a disclaimer is completely normal.
I really don't understand why El Reg is being negative about this?