The power of google

Woke up this morning thinking about the way that the brain computes solid objects and shapes from edges and lines. And then got onto edges and lines which do not compute into a sensible object, from where I associated to a three pronged affair that I first came across at school.

So once up, I ask google for 'trick geometrical objects' and find out in seconds that the three pronged affair is called a devil's fork, not to be confused with the place of the same name in South Carolina. I ask google for devil's forks and come up with lots of images of same, although not the particular one that I remember from school. I include one of them left, with the offending fork being top right.

Along the way I also come across an outfit called shutterstock, who offer images of all kinds of things, at a price, and I was pleased to find that they offer a huge number of good quality images of shopping trolleys; maybe I will buy one of them one day. In the meantime, they made me think that the whole business of images must be a happy hunting ground for lawyers.

So, I, with little in the way of image manipulation skills, am able to take images from shutterstock without paying, albeit not of the quality that I might need for their inclusion in commercial grade art work, but not without ticking a box which says that I promise not to cheat. Presumably, if I went on to publish such an image under my own name, perhaps on this blog, they could send their lawyers after me, through my email address with google. Would google cooperate with them? Would any case stand up in court? In the Channel Islands perhaps?

Acknowledgement for illustration, which was not taken from shutterstock: Weisstein, Eric W. 'Impossible Fork'. From MathWorld, a Wolfram web resource.

Reference 1: http://mathworld.wolfram.com/ImpossibleFork.html.

Reference 2: http://www.shutterstock.com/index-in.mhtml.