What do you think of this?

i just read this on the BBC website: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6936444.stm

I'm not sure what I think of it yet, but I find it disturbing to say the least.

Do they infinge on copyrights by doing this? Afterall the owners of the photos on flickr haven't given permission for parts of their photos to be used like this.

Very disturbing

Legal : Any lawyers out there?

The way I see it is use flickr and get bits of your images stolen - very nasty but what happens when they then start to use other image gallerys.

I saw that but my concerns where different.

If you put your images online, you may as well forget about any claim over them. You've lost control over them. It is as simple as that. If that bothers you, don't put them online or use tiny images or obtrusive watermarks.

My concern was that it is getting less and less likely that what you see in an image ever really existed. Digital images as any sort of record of the past are just about useless.

That is also one of my concerns lenscape. I feel really uneasy about this whole thing, yet the Beeb seem almost to be seeing it as the best thing since sliced bread

I've no doubt that using part of someone's image is a breach of copyright. Of course you have to be able to prove it, which may be not so easy.

Possibly sites will develop software that prevents this abuse.

Lets hope so - look how many images are available through the Pentax sites and this forum alone.

Seems a shame that we may all soon have to spoil our web images by applying watermarks to them.

I think some of the java-based websites can prevent snaffling of pictures - if you right-click and try and save as.. you get a message telling you that you cannot. However, I can't think of an example at the moment!

Such preventative efforts are a waste of time. If all else fails, you can always take a screenshot.

Yep, screenshot will get round anything really. Unless you have Vista which can read DRM from all sorts of sources and prevent such things.