Two issues
- what is our responsibility for proving right to use images?
- can Google prevent photo scraping sites from landing higher in search results than original sources?
Should we say where we get an image even if it is in the public domain?
If we find an image via Google's image search with the licence Tool set to filter by Creative Commons licence?
I wanted an image to convey my mid-journey step in which I refined my plan - and I thought of orienteering with map and compass. Found great lego orienteer images, but could not find who had made them available, (Google-search-filter)-allegedly by CC.
The one/s I liked appeared (and I list here not really to shame, but to show how far I explored looking for the image creator):
With licence statement but no link or credit at:
- (Copyright Creative Commons CC0) ecoparent - so I quickly checked on what CC0 means, and learned that if one is not the creator one should not label it as this site did.
with no copyright/licence statement or photo claim/credit at:
- The Glebe Primary School ,
- St Paulinus Catholic Primary School ,
- Puzzle Factory (français),
- The Rand Athletic Club Orienteers' Strava club page
- Italian Radio 6 INradio's Fifth Grade Tag list of posts thumbnail (but not in the post itself)
- And Argentaweb post
- and (eventually found with a reverse google image search using a screensnip) hundreds of other places including Jordan Tzvetkov's Twitter profile and Power of Ted
Then I briefly thought I had found the source - where it appeared to have been released into the Public Domain with CC0...
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| Screensnip of the CC0 claim by scraping site, see it yourself at webarchive |
- and where EXIF data is given as if shared by the creator. But still I wondered - particularly as there is no id for the photographer even though I would have to register to download the image. Is the site (pxhere.com [ph]) legit?
So I googled that!
is pxhere legit
and found I was right to be suspicious:
Photoscraping sites are not hard to detect.
Alan Levine shows how one scraping site had scraped an image from pixabay. A clue that a site is probably a scraper, he mentioned, is the lack of identification of the contributor. Later in the post Alan discussed how a CC-BY image he had on Flickr had been picked up by [ph] who claimed it as CC0 - an outright lie.
Now I suspect [ph]'s short url indicates they've probably even renumbered photos they scrape so I couldn't just swap out the domain, so I picked a few keywords and searched pixabay. Sure enough, there the image appears to have been created and shared CC0 by Andrew Martin (aitoff)
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| Image by Andrew Martin at Pixabay |
Aside - I am only 90% happy with the (optional for CC0) attribution phrase pixabay provides - they link fine to the user, but not at all to the image - so I edited the html, and hope they reconsider their default setting.
Google lets scrapers float up
Although the first image-scrape Alan discussed were images given to the public domain, the problem he describes is that Google lets photoscraper sites float to the top of their search results. I believe Google ought to find a way to prevent that.
Regardless, I would prefer to see everyone cite where they obtain the images they use online - particularly organisational sites like schools! Can we consider it a moral responsibility? I do. I also do not believe the difficulty of finding the true creators of public domain images releases anyone of that responsibility.
Creators: don't join scraping sites like [ph]
"It is impossible to delete your photos and your account, support simply ignores all requests. As a photographer, I highly do not recommend this service, a lot of photos are used with copyright infringement!" -- Danila Perevoshchikov 3 March 2020 at Facebook
