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The WRG Newsletter
by Mary Colette Wallace, Assoc. AIA ... ISSN 1530-8847 September 2004

Who's Copying Your Online Images?

"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking
new landscapes but in having new eyes." - Marcel Proust

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Images on the web are highly susceptible to unauthorized use. Building models,
photos or branded logos are easily copied. While firms may not be able to track the level of
theft, they can periodically search for them using image search engines such as Google.

At this time, there are several search engines that tout their capabilities to search images, but none that yet
come close to the accuracy of Google Images. Lest you think you are being overburdened to look at a few
pages of thumbnails, bear in mind that currently, Google image searches 'over 880,000,000 images' on the web.

Here's a quick method that relies on your image recognition abilities: Go to Google Images
and input 'seattle library' - you should retrieve around 3,420 images. Glancing at the images,
look for duplication of an image. Go through several of the pages, then back to the first page of retrievals.
On the first page about midway down, look at the computer image at this website: Teleread
Click on that URL and scroll midway down until you see the image. Hmmm, this is a critical post
about the Seattle Library. At the top of the page (remember you are still in Google) the image name
is revealed as 'seattlelibrarysaurus.jpg'. Is this an authorized image or a copy?

Now, go back to the page of thumbnail image retrievals and scan for the same image. At the bottom
of the thumbnails page there is the same image but this time it's titled 'seattle.jpg' at Haycock This
site says it's unavailable when you click on it; however, if you copy the web address into the search
window and click, you'll get the website coming up within Google. There it's we find this is a person's
'dissertation' page - with a critique of Rem Koolhaas' work. Go back to the Google images thumbnail page.

Since there are over 3,000 thumbnails, let's narrow the search by using Rem's last name. Input into the Google
image search window 'seattle library koolhaas'. You should get about 28 retrievals with about six of them being the
targeted computer rendering. Let's check to see who the websites are owned/operated by ARCSPACE."Model Photo
courtesy of OMA" Okay, this has proper credit - though it's not a photo (it's a computer rendering).

Go to the Austrian Architektur website where the image is named 'Koolhaas_1.JPG'. Most likely, this
usage is with permission. However, at this site - Spikyart - the image is renamed as 'seattle.jpg'. Notice this
is the same image name as the dissertation we looked at earlier. It appears that perhaps one of the persons
using the image with this name has copied it from the other. 

Now go to the December 18, 2002 page of ArchitectureWeek where the image is renamed '12010_image_5.150.jpg'.
This appears to be a legitimate use of the image, giving proper credit. And here we finally gain the information
about who created the image. Let's visit that thumbnail which is at the bottom of the page. It's
Ron Lloyd Associates, a virtual imaging company, where we find the image named 'libra22p.jpg' - the original image.

So what did we learn? In seven of the images, three appear to be authorized, one is a maybe and three appear
not to be authorized. We also learned that in order to evade and deceive, images are copied then renamed
and used. We found that using Google's image searching capabilities most images can still be tracked down.
And that with creative searching and persistence, unauthorized image usage can be found.

<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>

PURELY FOR FUN

After all this, you may be ready for a bit of fun with the Seattle Library image.
Go to  c6.org website and input seattle library.

<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>

"They copied all they could follow but

they couldn't copy my mind so I left

them sweating and stealing a year

and a half behind." - Rudyard Kipling

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© 2001-2006 THE WALLACE RESEARCH GROUP

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