tedster - 12:53 pm on Sep 25, 2012 (gmt 0)

Seems to me that the web itself is creating a major cultural challenge to all previous ideas of intellectual property. The complaints about search engines (Google and others) go back to the practice of serving a cached page - which was a big issue here ten years ago and not so much these days.

At the same time, there seems to be a generational divide going on in the culture. The younger generations seem to have a lot less concern about the whole issue. I'm not sure what that's all about.

There have been several legal rulings about search engines and whether this kind of thing legally falls under Fair Use - and so far most of the time, the rulings seem to fall on the side of the search engines. Something has got to give, but I fear it's going to be a many year evolution, and not a once and done "fix".

When it comes to image misuse, I already spend more time than I want to policing the whole thing and trying to defend my IP rights and those of my clients. Seems to me technology itself is at the root of this challenge, and that technology ought to be part of the solution.

Image Search has always been terrible at proper attribution. There ought to be a way for technology to offer a fix, but so far no one seems to be championing the cause very effectively. Yes, that includes Google - but they are far from unique or alone.