ImageLogr Scrapes "Billions" of Images Illegally 271
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.'"
Google image search? (Score:3, Interesting)
Isn't this essentially what Google's image search does? The difference is that if you want the full-sized version, Google sends you to the original web site.
Re:Google image search? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Don't cry now (Score:2, Interesting)
Are you fucking joking?
The first thing to go when ripping a DVD is the FBI warning.
Re:Yeah. That's it. (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Information wants to be free, yes? (Score:3, Interesting)
I highly doubt that the majority of Slashdot, who are largely developers who rely on copyright's protections for their income, say that copyright should not exist
Most developers work on custom solutions and programs (providing services), and aren't really benefiting at all from copyright protection.
Re:ah... (Score:3, Interesting)
Looking at something and copying it are two very different things.
(Albeit, it's literally impossible to look at something on the web without making a local copy, at least in RAM, which may be saved to a temporary file on disk and retained for years, or until the authorities toss out your hard drive because the retention period for evidence in your case has lapsed...)
Copying something and serving it to the public are two very different things.
The submitted missed the amazing part twice (Score:5, Interesting)
The amazing part is how someone gets enough storage space to store every image on the web.
That sounds expensive to me.
Re:but wait... (Score:1, Interesting)
'cause at the very least music or movie someone downloaded still has the name of the original source (artist, studio) plastered all over it.
Re:Yeah. That's it. (Score:2, Interesting)
Maybe the way forward is a photography tax, like a casual trading licence for street vendors.
Re:but wait... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:ah... (Score:3, Interesting)
Feel free. However, if you lie for financial gain, that's fraud. Identity theft isn't a crime. If someone asks me my name and I tell them "George Bush" I won't be arrested (unless I'm lying to a government official in certain capacities). It's when I go to the bank and tell them I'm George Bush in order to steal the bank's money that it becomes a crime. I have no problem with someone stealing my identity. I have an issue with fraud. Those are unrelated, and no one would be confusing them except for a long and expensive campaign by financial institutions for blaming their customers for the financial institutions being victims of fraud because of their lax security.
They Were Lying (Score:4, Interesting)
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.