Is 'Fair Use' Unfair To Humans?

An anonymous reader writes "This article in Wired advances the idea that humans are losing the copyright battle against machines because the fair use laws are tilted against them. The writer wanted to include photos in his book, but the licensing fees were too high. The aggregators, though, like Google, are building their own content by scraping all of the photos they can find. If anyone complains, they just say, 'Fill out a DMCA form.' Can humans compete against the machines? Should humans be able to use the DMCA to avoid copyright fees too? Should web sites be able to shrug and say, 'Hey, we just scraped it?'"

There is a way to mark them

[stewsters]

Put this in a file called robots.txt on the root of your website:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Boom. Your images wont get illegally used by Google. You can send me the money your would have spent on lawyers.

Re:Copyright itself is problematic for technology

[Anonymous Coward]

Getting rid of copyright only helps the very same megacorps that Slashdot whines about. Why would any of the MPAA/RIAA member companies, for example, need to pay any royalties to their artists when they could just swipe the work for themselves and be done with it? The only reason they pay artists anything is due copyright law.