Do Search Engines Expedite the Theft of Digital Images?
Misc.
'But to make such gawking possible, search engines are taking a controversial step. Their technology, which uses Web searching tools called spiders, now makes copies of every image they come across, whether the search engines have permission to do so or not. Those images, many of which are reduced to thumbnail size, are then displayed in the search engine's results listings, again without explicit approval from the artists who created the images in the first place.'

I should write a short piece that simply catalogs every conflict about copyrights in the digital era I can think of, no commentary, nothing. Search engines can only access publicly available imagery, so is this use legal? (Probably not.) Ethical? (Possibly.) What about the next gradation on the scale? Fun fun fun.