see I knew there was a reason I never put pics on the interwebnet

James has published an interesting entry about his friends girlfriend discovering photo’s used without permission in an advert [images taken from here, advert scanned here]
Now aside from the weblog issues, the main problem I see here is that search engines like google and altavista offer the facility to search for images and not pages. Don’t get me wrong I love this facility but when it brings up results [like this] with images which may be copyrighted it poses potential problems.
I was always against having my pic on the web because I work for an ISP and my colleagues could stumble across potentially bad pictures of me. Also the number of my colleagues I discovered with gaydar accounts made me think twice about having images which did not fall into the ‘g-rated’ category.
All in all I think the interwebnet is a useful tool but the potential for abuse is huge.
How many times have we seen the same thing on the web? People ‘borrowing code’ [I fully admit to this on a number of occasions], remember the spot the difference competition between blogger and blogger.com.br? something like that – same but in different colours and language. I’m sure you remember it was pretty big at the time.
So what to do? I see no easy solution to this. In fact one of the things that makes the interwebnet so useful is it’s functionality. Remove some or all of this because of abuse and it becomes a pretty boring place.
No more search for the ugly Iain‘s out there!