I am generally of the belief that copyright laws are too strict. 

On the other hand, if we make it harder for people to make money with creative work, then we're going to have less professional-quality creative work. 

There's an analogous situation going on with Google Translate. It works by looking at strings of words in documents that have already been translated online, and copying the translation for that phrase. That's a fine idea, except that the author of the original translation doesn't get compensated. You may say he or she doesn't deserve to be -- but the less we pay translators, the fewer professional translators we have. 

Someone recently asked me whether I shared my creative writing online. I answered, "No." And this is the main reason why. I am not vain enough to think my creative musings are of any particular interest to anyone other than me, but I certinly do not want a lazy student to use them for his/her English  homework or to see one of my good lines appear in someone else's novel or poem. 

As an atrist I see both sides of the coin.

First no one likes to work hard and then have their work pulled away from them by anybody who wants it. However, before we put google in the stocks so we can taunt them in public, we must consider one fact.

Google isn't so much making it possible to take an image, they are just helping to skip steps. You could still go to the website and download the image straight from them. Google just lets an individual to download without having to go through all those steps. Much the same as if someone were going to steal a TV, they would have to get in a locked door or window, somehow disengage the alarm system, get past any dogs and get the TV out of the house on detected. Google just hung a key next to the door with a paper telling the combination to the security, and closed the dogs up in a back room. Maybe even scooted the TV closer to the door.

I often go to the images, not to steal anything, but to get a picture (low res is fine for this) to draw something related. I do not steal their image, but use it to get an angle right. Or recently I was doing a cartoon involving a chainsaw. I imaged chainsaws to get an image so I could draw one accurate. Many cartoonists and commerical artist used to keep Sears' catalogs and travel brochures for this very purpose. The internet just helped keep the stack of papers down off the desk or out of the filling cabinet. It has also saved me more than a few hours looking for where I filed a certain picture. Need it again? Just go to Google again.

I do not like my work stolen and I wouldn't steal someone else's but it is nice to have the convience when I need an aid to draw something.

I am not condoning Googles actions here, but like I said they are not so much providing the way to steal an image so much as saving the culpret a few steps.

This isn't a matter of legality or copyright. 

The moment something is available online, it's going to be copied.  Period.  Forget about protecting it.  That's like trying to use a handful of security guards to stop about a hundred million ninjas from taking photos of something in a huge field.

Heck the moment anything is published, chances are it will wind up on the Internet and then forget about controlling it.

Regardless if it's right or wrong, it's going to happen.  Going after Google won't do much:   either they wind up making their work harder to find by their customers, or they find their work copied by others through other means.

Far better to start adapting to use the copying to one's advantage than trying to fight it.  Nothing else will make a difference.

There are a lot of unsophisticated people who don't know anything about copyright. While lack of knowledge is no protection against being charged with a crime, I don't think it should give a for-profit company the right to potentially earn income from someone else's creativity. Lawyers get tangled in knots over copyright. How can the regular man and woman even begin to understand these issues? Saying "don't post photos online" is one defense but that really means never sharing any images with any friends or family members via any social network. There should be a more reasonable defense.

One difficulty is that you can't stop Google indexing websites you don't control.

If your work is on a site you don't control, then your problem isn't really with Google as much as the site that has somehow obtained your work without your consent. Or the owner of the work should read terms of service contracts more carefully?

if an author or photography loses royalties through Google's actions, they're certainly losing something.

Hmm. But it's a lot harder to define what they've lost since "royalties not collected" aren't exactly a hard quantity. If it were, then I could claim I've lost an infinite amount of royalties from all the people who haven't paid me for things I've created...

One difficulty is that you can't stop Google indexing websites you don't control.  As for infringing versus stealing, if an author or photography loses royalties through Google's actions, they're certainly losing something.

Is copyright a right that should really expand ownership to all intangible information? Hmm...

If you don't want your photos or text or whatever you create to be indexed and promoted by Google, there's a faily simple solution: don't let Google index it. There's a thing called robot.txt that will ban Google from indexing your works. If you're really paranoid, just don't upload your works to the Internet.

Google isn't "stealing" as much as infringing copyright. Stealing generally implies a loss of something physical, but Google isn't taking anything away from anyone -- in fact, it's giving things away to everyone...