Remember, Kids, Google Image Search Is Just A *First Step*

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

If you don’t check out the context and description of the neat image you found, you’re liable to end up with egg on your face like this:

Catholic News Service Celebrates Hanukkah with Snap of Frieze of Vespasian Sacking The Temple

2

That’s even worse than the New York guy ages ago who looked for an image of a “Skyline” to promote some NYC event and ended up with a drawing of the Boston skyline, complete with the Citgo sign. At least nobody was hurt in that case.

3

Ok, than is ridiculous for many reasons.

  1. Vespasian never sacked the Temple. Titus did.
  2. That’s an image of the Temple sack. That’s from the Arch of Titus (constructed by Domitian), and it depicts his (Titus’s) Triumph, not the sacking itself.
  3. It’s also anarchonistic. The rededication of the Temple, the Maccabees etc took place centuries before. If you need to show a sack, I am sure there are plenty of paintings of Nebuchadnezzar’s sack, hell, I have see a couple.
4

Last year (maybe more?) a news station used an image of the Stars Nazis put on Concentration Camp uniforms to commemorate Rosh Hashanah.

5

Is using Google Images this way even legal? Most of the time people do this, they don’t bother to credit the true source of the image. Seems like plagiarism to me.

6

Here’s a story that just happened the other day. Julia Roberts was on Ellen and was talking about how she played a Mouse at Showbiz Pizza. They showed a photo on the screen of a Birthday Party from long ago with a little kid and the Mouse at Showbiz Pizza. The picture was funny because the little kid was wearing a tee short that read “Dick The Birthday Boy”. It turns out this wasn’t just a random picture they found with a Google Image search. It was a photo of Rich Evan, one of the people form Redletter Media. It was an old photo of his they found in his deceased Grandmother’s photos and totally made fun of him about it a few years back.

7

The Post Office got caught by this.

You’ve probably seen one of these stamps. It’s the basic first class stamp the Post Office has been using since 2010. It’s based on an image that the stamp designer found on Google Image Search.

The problem is it’s not an image of the actual Statue of Liberty. It’s an image of a replica of the Statue of Liberty that’s on display in Las Vegas. And the Post Office didn’t pay for the image rights (this was unintentional; they did pay for image rights but it was the wrong ones). The case was finally settled last July and the Post Office had to pay the sculptor $3,500,000.

8

Hm. The tone of this thread rather implies the Vatican sent an unintended message with that one.