How is this not a massive copyright violation? When I upload a photo to, say, Instagram, I know I’m granting them a perpetual license to do basically anything with my photo, but scrapers don’t inherit those rights.
They should just Store the hash. That said, maybe they are able to argue in the same way Google Image Search does that it is fair use.
Google Image Search has consent of the site owners, via robots.txt
The article does say what Ton-That did violates most sites' TOS. It's now up to the sites to take legal action against him.
I mean, it's a search engine right? Google scrapes Facebook at global scale.
No it doesn’t. Google honors Facebook’s robots.txt, which excludes basically all the valuable data. It’s why they blew billions trying to get us all to switch to Google+.
That's so weird because I see text and images from fb domains in google search results all the time. Likewise LinkedIn.
No, I’m talking about them being apparently vulnerable to a trillion-dollar copyright lawsuit from the users — that is, the owners of the copyrights on the photos they’re storing, analyzing, and redistributing.