If you do a reverse image search on the original stock photograph in question, you will see that it has been reposted hundreds of times before this, surely without proper attribution. Obviously some guy in the graphics department found it and saw it was everywhere, attributed in all sorts of ways.
Is it really reasonable to expect everybody to go on an archaelogical dig to track down stock photos through hundreds of copies to trace the original from some Australian blog? If I use a snippet of "open source" code, am I morally/legally obligated to also scour the internet, trace its geneology through hundreds of Stack Overflow answers/random Github repos that it's already in, just to make sure the person licensing it as open source didn't, himself, steal it from somewhere else?
Yes... because the creator reserves all rights to copyrighted works (with some legal exceptions). If you cant find the creator, then you have no rights to use the image. To get such rights, you need to contact the creator and ask. That's the way it works.
Just because you don't know who to ask, doesnt mean you're magically granted rights you dont have to an asset you had no part in creating.
Google indexes the books, not repackaging them for a different audience. Fundamentally they're doing the same thing for books that they do for web pages, whose copyrights are also not violated by search indexing.
Netflix's designer, on the other hand, appropriated someone else's photograph wholesale.
Yes it is reasonable. Graphic designers typically use stock materials so that they know the licenses are taken care of. Many companies have a "nothing but stock" policy to ensure this exact issue never occurs, and they pay Getty et al literally millions of dollars a year for licenses.
And if you're a CTO, yes it is in fact your responsibility to verify that you have the legal right to use code in your codebase.
> Is it really reasonable to expect everybody to go on an archaelogical dig to track down stock photos through hundreds of copies to trace the original from some Australian blog?
Google Image Search is not a stock photo library. There are plenty of stock images of VHS tapes available for licensing; just google "VHS stock photo." Whoever made those images probably worked for a design company with standing accounts; they were just too lazy to use them.
> If I use a snippet of "open source" code, am I morally/legally obligated to also scour the internet, trace its geneology through hundreds of Stack Overflow answers/random Github repos that it's already in, just to make sure the person licensing it as open source didn't, himself, steal it from somewhere else?
Irrelevant, because the designer didn't have a good-faith belief that they were licensing the image correctly. They just pulled it off a GIS and didn't bother.
But since you bring up open source, do you think you're morally/legally obligated to abide by the terms of the relevant open source license when you use open source code? Or do you think you can just do whatever you want with it, because obeying the law is hard?
The premise in your question is wrong. If they wanted a stock photo of a VHS tape and rights to use it, they should have gone to one of the countless stock photo sites, searched for "VHS" and bought it. Not just randomly google image search for VHS and hope they found something that's free to use.
If people are licensing a proprietary work as open source, they are in trouble, not you. What if Netflix actually bought/licensed the image from a third-party that stole from the original author?
Is it really reasonable to expect everybody to go on an archaelogical dig to track down stock photos through hundreds of copies to trace the original from some Australian blog? If I use a snippet of "open source" code, am I morally/legally obligated to also scour the internet, trace its geneology through hundreds of Stack Overflow answers/random Github repos that it's already in, just to make sure the person licensing it as open source didn't, himself, steal it from somewhere else?