brotherhood_of_LAN - 10:47 pm on Oct 7, 2012 (gmt 0)

Fair enough, it does explicitly say that it uses 'the collective intelligence of the Web'.

But what the knowledge graph isn't doing is displaying facts 'taken from the web'.

It does raise some more traditional philosophical questions about knowledge and understanding... but I'm going to be staunch in my opinion and stick to the idea that Google isn't doing anything new and special with those images, it just has a better way of displaying them (and one less click/search away).

If I had the resources to scrape the web right now, and had a method to discern that the Eiffel Tower, The Louvre, Versailles are all locations to visit in Paris.... what would be the problem? Displaying copyrighted images is neither here or there tbh, image owners have the powers to block Google from taking their content.

But going back to the 'the collective intelligence of the Web' aspect, I think we're hard pushed to say that Google is unfair in discerning 'knowledge' from the information it gathers online. I've certainly learned a thing or ten from knowing people in my life, but I would hope they wouldn't claim ownership of my wisdom.