I understand the premise of the milennium copyright act. The point is that the copyright is just "universal" It doesn't stand well in court if you haven't identified beforehand what version of copyright is applied to the work.
If person A slams a C on their artwork, or nothing at all, and then takes person B to court over posting it elsewhere without their permission, person B's lawyer is just going to say "Yeah okay, and where does it say wether that this is a non distribution licenced work, or a creative common layer 3?". And the judge will be like "lolyeah".
Posting stuff without a specification will not hold up in court. Unless party A can prove they have suffered significant damages over their work being plagiarized, they will not hold up in court. As long as nobody posts leaked versions of the Hobbit III that they stole from the director's house on here or something likewise.
That is a faulty comparison and you know it. The actual copyrighted work doesn't shows up in google images. When you google a torrent, it doesn't actually give you the content, Google does not stream the hypothetical copyright infringing work on their server, the only thing they refer is text that is written by the user submitter, which lel, is CC layer 1. In fact I don't think Piratebay even specifies any licence over the content held within the website, user submitted content or torrent or whatever.
I'm actually very confused at what you're trying to say. Why is linking to one sort of content different from linking to another sort of content? Because that's what google does, link to content. It doesn't save the content on their servers, whether it be torrents or images.
Take for example a personal blog where the owner posts an image of his dog. Googles spiders will find that image and you will be able to search for it on the image search. No matter if that owner has specified anything for that image. He does however have copyright of the image if he took it himself. But since Google only links to that image, they can't be held responsible for any copying. Now, for anyone following The Pirate Bay's trials a few years back, this was actually what they were convicted of, linking to illegal content. TPB never stored anything on their own servers, they are merely a search engine, such as Google, but specifically for torrents. It's a very interesting case, because it basically means Google has been determined to be illegal in Sweden. Not that that would stick in court, but it's still fascinating.
As for your lawyer example, it does NOT have to say that something is non-distribution, it's the other way around. Kind of like innocent until proven guilty. Anything and everything that someone has created is non-distribution unless stated otherwise. Creative Commons is a license that you can put on your own work if you accept that your work can be remixed, reused or whatever. Person A does NOT have to put a C on the image. The copyright is there automagically the moment you create the piece.
Whether or not something will stick in court is determined if Person A can prove that he is the original creator or not. And unless Person B can show that Person A has in fact put a CC license on it that makes Person B's usage valid, Person B can very well be held responsible for paying any damages caused by borrowing the piece. It's very unlikely however that something like that would be settled in court unless, for example, Person B has profited from Person A's work, or it is deemed that Person A has lost profit because of the borrowing, such as the lawyers of hollywood producers try to tell you pirates cost them money even if the pirates doesn't make any money themselves.
I'm also not sure what you mean by saying that you have to specify a copyright version, could you clarify what you mean by version(s)?
I'd say though, that even if the original owner of some art wanted you to remove it from the server, the worst you'd get is a slap on the wrist and be told to remove it. I think this we are in agreement on?
Let it be known that I'm a member of the swedish Pirate Party. I'm all for free culture, creative commons and sharing of ideas, but for the sake of getting the facts straight, you'd do best in learning a lot more about how copyright and creative commons licenses work before you borrow someones work in belief that you're free to do as you wish with it just because you could find it via Google.
I'm having this discussion only to make sure that you know the facts, not to slap your fingers for doing something illegal or letting something illegal go on. I could care less about that. You can take this information as you please, whether or not you have your believes of your own version of how the system works. As said, I'm all for free culture and I am not a poster boy for playing by the rules myself. But at least I know what rules and laws I'm breaking if I do break them.
I'll leave you with a helpful tip though, when you use Google Image search, go to Search Tools and under the Usage Rights-option you can filter your search results based on different usage rights. Just the mere fact that the original turned on option is that it doesn't filter out anything based on a usage license should tell you that not everything on Google image search is up for grabs. But using that option should also help you find images that you can re-use with less worry. I would however still recommend that you look at the page the image comes from and look at the terms yourself. There could be things that google hasn't picked up on, it is after all just an automated system.
TLDR;
Helpful link for finding reusable images with Google image search:
http://google.about.com/od/searchingtheweb/ss/find_public_domain_images.htm
