Trust No-One???

One of my new customers, who's next site is almost ready to go live, obviously trusts no-one. And in my experience, he's right.

Maybe that's a bit of an exageration. But every image we create for the site has his logo somewhere on it. I'm not talking graphics that create the layout, I mean the pictures of products; pictures that form part of instructions; pictures to expand on the text. Every one of them has the logo - and a reminder when (as I often do) I forget.

But he's right. We're putting in time & effort taking pictures, cleaning them up and presenting them - and they look great. There are plenty of people out there who think that it's fine to trawl Google Images and copy every image they come across for their own sites.

What these people forget is that copyright does exist. You can't just copy images off someone's site - you need to ask permission. But the number of customers who pass images over and it turns out that's where they are from is amazing.

I suppose Google should create a new metatag that can be placed either in images or on the page that tells it not to index these images in Google images. Professional photographers and artists creating work to sell do find their work used on other sites, without thanks or payment.

I'm not blaming Google, but they have created a tool that makes people think that any image is fair game to copy. Maybe an option in return to opt out would be advisable.