Have you seen any of the Web 2.0 applications that have a button to add an image to your document according to a topic you type in? They then go and search the web (Yahoo images, in the cases I’ve seen) for an image to rip off and put in your document. No source or attribution listed, and yes, they include copyrighted image.

Does this seem like copyright infringement to you? It does to me.

This is even worse than right-clicking any image off the internet or inserting an image from a URL, because as a user, you could innocuously choose this feature and not really know you’re doing something wrong.

I can’t quite imagine how anyone thinks this is ok, though I know my idea of fair use is not the broadest in the world. Let me know if you can rationalize this somehow.

Now if someone did this with CC-licensed content (and included an attribution), that would be brilliant.

IP thievery

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