It is a mess.  It has long been my understanding, heaven knows from where, that taking a screen shot (which may include images) and reproducing it evades copyright problems.  This sounds like the same thing, essentially.

I was doing some research last night into copyright law as it pertains to Twitter images, and found this article:

Want To Publish A Twitter Image Legally? Just Embed It.

A Manhattan judge has ruled against The Washington Post and the AFP for republishing a Twitter user's photos. But if the image had been inside an embedded Tweet, it may have been fine. A strange loophole.

A U.S. District Judge has ruled that the AFP and Washington Post infringed on copyright by posting photographer Daniel Morel's photos of earthquake damage in Haiti.

The photos were posted to Twitter, from which the AFP submitted them to Getty. WaPo found the images on Getty and posted them on its website. The ruling explains, over the course of about 60 pages, that just because the images were posted to Twitter doesn't mean they were fair game for reposting elsewhere. The AFP argued that Twitter's terms of service, which allows the site to "reproduce" users' images, gave it the right to do the same. The judge said no.

Here's the thing: If this same situation occurred today, there would be a legal way to repost Morel's photos without his direct permission. All The Washington Post would have to do is use Twitter's embed function.

Twitter tells BuzzFeed that embedded tweets — that is, tweets that are embedded into the site using Twitter's official embed tool — fall under Twitter's reposting rights, as outlined in its terms of service.... 

In other words, if you download a photo from Twitter, upload it to your servers, and publish it to your Website, that's a copyright violation. However, it's legal if you do the same thing using Twitter's embed code, where the photo is hosted on Twitter's servers.

Copyright law on the Internet is insane. 

That's because copyright law was never intended to be understood by mere mortals. Copyright law is a function of the industrial era, when you needed a factory or printing press to infringe significantly enough for the law to take notice, and if you had those things you could afford to pay a lawyer to interpret crazy copyright law for you. But now everybody has a factory and printing press on their desk and in their briefcase. 

And Google's copyright cop activities often backfire, resulting in takedowns of perfectly legitimate videos. 

While creative people deserve to get paid, perhaps copyright -- regulating copies -- is no longer the answer. For one thing, the Internet is a copying machine -- every time you look at a Web page or view a video, you're making a copy and theoretically violating copyright. 

Well said. Except I'm not sure anyone (regardless of their profession) deserves payment. Obviously, people should be paid for working, but if their work is completed -- how long should they be compensated for? If my shift ends at the factory, I don't get paid for items produced after I stop working. But a recording of a song still produces royalties beyond the death of the original singer....? Something is weird there.

Not necessarily so, mhhfive.  As a photographer, I might give permission to a site to display my images.  I don't think I therefore give permission to anyone else to take them and display them.

I think you've just described why reading TOS's carefully is a good idea for photographers who care about their copyright/privacy. You should only upload your work to sites that have agreeable policies and robot.txt files...

And the idea that nobody could ever reasonably claim loss of earnings when their work is stolen is legally radical to say the least. 

I don't think anyone suggested that NOBODY could claim a loss of earnings from copyright infringement. BUT equating a copy with a "sales loss" is economically questionable. If someone pirates a DVD, did they "steal" whatever the price of that DVD is? 

Google has acted as a copyright cop on Youtube for years, now carefully screening music to make sure users aren't placing copyrighted material online without permission.

Google acts as a cop on YouTube because it knows the big music corporations will sue.  Little people (bloggers, photographers) don't count so much.

 The flip side of this is it's ALREADY easy to grab photos from the original web page. Just download them or take a screenshot. So can Google really be blamed for removing that very small extra step?

Try this:

it's ALREADY easy to grab an article by Mitch Wagner from his own website. Just copy and paste. So can Google really be blamed for reproducing it elsewhere?

I think this would evidently be a problem if we were dealing with text rather than images.  Google sending traffic to a website is different.

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.

True, Dave, but I think we assume for the sake of argument that the Website has rights to host the image.  If stealing the image from the Website is wrong, then what's different about what Google is doing?

(If the Website doesn't have rights to host the image, then it's a bad actor like Google.)

dcawrey - If I'm reading this right, 95% of Google's revenues come from ads, and the lion's share of that is AdWords: Google 2012 Financial Tables.

mpouraryan - My rule is that copyright law is so fundamentally broken that it makes it incumbent on each of us to be extra-careful to do the right thing. 

Like Bob Dylan said, to live outside the law you must be honest. Copyright law is so bad that we all live outside the law.