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 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.
