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Ask HN: Is there an audit tool to check for Copyrighted images on my sites?

4 points by Killah911 ↗ HN
I received an e-mail today form PicScout that an image on one of my client's site was copyrighted. Which is odd since I have subscriptions to quite a few stock photography sites for my designers to use. Needless to say my client was freaking out a bit and so was I.

My company manages tons of content for many small businesses. Besides implementing draconian rules for all designers and content publishers on the site, I can only think of one thing to do, i.e. to scan all of my sites for images which may be copyrighted.

I googled around a bit, found tineye.com and of course pic scout. My instinct is to write a little bit of python code to grab all the images from the website directories from my server and upload them one by one to something like picscout. Maybe someone's done that already.

Anyone here know of such a tool?

3 comments

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ggchappell
A clarification: all the images on your sites are copyrighted, with the exceptions -- in the U.S. -- of images created by the U.S. federal government, and digitizations of very old images -- e.g., a photograph of the Mona Lisa.

Your problem does not stem from the fact that images are covered by copyright, but from violations of license terms.

(A bit nitpicky, perhaps, but I figure if we're going to solve a problem, then we first ought to know what the problem is.)

MichaelCrawford
I'm not dead certain, but while an old image is out of copyright, a digitization won't be.

The image in the digital photo will be out of copyright, but the digital file is a newly created work.

My reasoning has to do with how commonly I find copyrighted scores to traditional folk songs. The notes and words are exactly the same, however the actual document is new.

MichaelCrawford
I don't know of an existing tool, but I have lots of experience with 2-D image processing. I have some ideas as to how it could be done somewhat more efficiently than brute-force.

If you're really freaking, perhaps I could flog my consulting service, and write the program for you under contract?