Yeah, it's not like they just have a giant image search engine laying around!

YouTube already has copyright infringement bots that mark copyrighted content and either give the holder the option to put ads on it or take it down.

Search also puts a lot of effort into identifying duplicated content to punish content farms. I've heard they're making progress on detecting algorithmically spun articles too (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_spinning).

Oh, and they have it for images. Here's the search result for the one they used: https://www.google.com/search?tbs=sbi:AMhZZivFQlmjC8rcxWC0MZ...

So yes, it'd be trivial for them to do so.

I would expect them to read it once, and bounce it back to the author saying something along the lines of "Cite your sources, please." That's certainly within Google's power, no?

But if it's on the web, doesn't it belong to Google now?

Aw crap. That was in the ToS wasn't it?

BTW completely feasible with Google's resources. Can be fully automated, too.

No, but you would expect some kind of seriousness... Universities don't need to run image-similarity through papers published by their students right? Plagiarism is a big thing.

Right. They tell them the policy and make sure it is understood, then they trust them because they cannot police every single image.

They do (almost) the same thing at youtube, don't they?