If a world famous search engine wanted some good publicity...

...they could help owners of copyright in images track down their "orphaned" works.

A hot news story in the UK in recent days has been the passing of a law to allow photographs to be published without the copyright owner's consent, provided a "diligent search" has been undertaken to find the owner. See http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-22337406

Many photographers are careful to embed "metadata" within their photographs that explicitly declares the ownership of the image, but many online publishers (e.g. Facebook and the BBC) strip all such metadata from the "user generated content" they publish. This is probably excusable, since it's the only practical way to avoid the risk of obscene or libellous material being secreted in the metadata. By the way, if you're looking for an easy to use program to add metadata to your own photographs, I recommend Photini (what I wrote).

Apparently the new law makes it the photographer's responsibility to discover re-publication of his or her images and then to apply for payment from a central fund. The only problem is, how do you find out if one of your images has been re-published? I recently did a Google image search for my name, and found two instances of photographs I'd uploaded to Flickr being used without my permission. In one case the image was credited to me, in the other they'd included my name in their image file name. (In both cases, had they asked, I'd have said yes.)

With Google's huge database of Internet published images, and a bit of image processing software, they could make it much easier to find instances of an image being re-published elsewhere on the web where the perpetrator hasn't made it quite so easy to spot the theft. They already detect web pages with similar text, to reduce their pagerank on the assumption it's copied boilerplate text, so why not find very similar images in the same way? This would also help those performing a "diligent search" to find the true author of an image, rather than simply allowing them to assume it's an "orphan work".

Google Image Labeller

I've recently discovered the Google Image Labeller (or Labeler as they call it) and am slightly hooked. However, I remain to be convinced that it's of any use at all.

It appears to be an attempt to improve image searching by "crowdsourcing" human cataloguing of images. It's presented as a game. You and a random partner are presented with a series of images which you each label. You score points when you and your partner assign the same labels. Certain labels are "off limits" - presumably these are ones Google already has enough votes for to believe they're valid. You are given two minutes to do as many images as you can. When the time is up you are shown what labels your partner chose for each image.

This all sounds quite clever, but I do wonder if the labels are going to be any good. Firstly the images presented are too small. In many cases I simply cannot see what the picture is of and so cannot label it meaningfully. Secondly the time element gets in the way. Thirdly your partner can "pass" on an image after which there is no point in labelling it, which can be annoying. Lastly, on seeing some of the labels my partners have chosen I find myself thinking "what is this guy on?".

Wisdom of crowds? Maybe, but if you do an image search and get crazy answers, perhaps it's because the crowd is full of village idiots. (Or mavericks, as I believe they're called in Alaska. Whoops, little bit of politics there.)

Flash fashion

Why oh why oh why are so many websites falling victim to the current mania for Flash graphics? Obviously it's a good way of doing complicated things like the Scrabulous game or the BBC iPlayer, but just what does it add to a straightforward static page, apart from download time and accessibility problems?

The worst example I've been hit by recently is the Dilbert site. I used to visit this every morning, for a useful antidote to another day at work, but then they added so much futile Flash that it's become almost unusable.

However, all is not lost. I've recently started using Google Reader to subscribe to various web sites' feeds (such as the BBC Internet Blog or my internet connection daily usage figures) and have added the Dilbert site feed. This delivers just the cartoon strip, with minimal overhead. Perfect!