Who needs microstock anymore ? Thanks to a new plug in for Microsoft office, it has become child play to easily rip an image found with Google Image and include it into a presentation or word document.

There are absolutely no copyright warning and nothing to advise the user that they might be breaking the law. See explanation video :

The news and description of this plug in was announced on [1] TechCrunch website and the comments are rolling in regarding the legal issues. This falls into the “whatever is on the internet” is free to use, a perception widely popular. It is also a sad example on how easy companies like Google makes image grabbing easy. Sure, that would be a great application to have if it was linked to a photo agency portal, or even Flickr’s collection of Creative Commons. If people decide to offer images for free, then let it be.Since Microsoft offers a similar service on their website for Office users, albeit only linked to some microstock comapnies, it will be interesting to see if they will challenge this new plug in .

Finally, this is not the last of these application using Google Images that we will see. Unfortunately.