Thanks for that SLP. I can't find a way of starting a new topic here with a title that might get anyone's attention......something like "ALL YOUR PHOTO's IS NOW BELONG TO US".

Anyway, basically that article reports that the law in UK on copyright of photo's available online has been changed dramatically; effectively passing into law what F***Book attempted to do a few months ago but met with such outcry that they seemingly abandoned it! These guys abandon nothing, they just get 'smarter/even more devious' and get the lobbyist cq 'law-making' process to do it for them.

I'll assume that getting UK law changed by lobbyists is faster, easier and cheaper than going via the US Congress route and that's why it's being done first in the UK, thus  creating  precedent in the jurisdiction that brought everyone the Magna Carta.....so the rest of world is about to follow!

Here's the Slashdot reference to that same The Register article you posted above:

The UK govt passed the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act which effectively makes so-called 'orphaned' content posted on social media sites public domain. Corporations now only need to have made a "diligent search" to find the owner of the content before use. From the article: 'The Act contains changes to UK copyright law which permit the commercial exploitation of images where information identifying the owner is missing, so-called "orphan works", by placing the work into what's known as "extended collective licensing" schemes. Since most digital images on the internet today are orphans - the metadata is missing or has been stripped by a large organization - millions of photographs and illustrations are swept into such schemes

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/13/04/29/177203/uk-passes-instagram-act?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed

Also interesting to see that metadata stripping of iS images for Goog was not some accidental occurrence: it was being planned ahead of the legislation which they knew was about to be passed into law.