Nextstop is a rather smart user review website that's been developed using Google's application protocol by two ex-googlers.
It's garnering a lot of interest and I can see why.

It's really really smart.

Let's say you want to review somewhere, it finds all the basic info for you so you don't need to spend time doing it. For example, you want to review a nice little restaurant you happen to know. Type in the name of the restaurant and the city and Nextstop offers suggestions for the address, pulls in a bunch of photos, plots it on a map and gives you some simple tick boxes to classify your review.

And... it's amazingly fast. Google worked out very quickly that speed was really important for keeping searchers using their search engine... and these guys clearly took that learning with them.

And... you can sign up using your Facebook ID so for millions of people it's just a case of entering your Facebook password and you're off. It even pulls in your profile pic from Facebook.

And... you can follow others on the site - just as you do with Twitter and Facebook.

And... you can create widgets of your reviews to stick on other sites.

Functionally it really is brilliant. Better by a mile than anything else I've seen. All sorts of clever other elements like suggesting other places based on people who've recommended like you and nearby places too. Faultless.

But for me as a content creator and owner there's a problem... Look at this. Pic number 8 there is clearly a copyrighted pic... and pic number 7? Who took that shot and does Nextstop have permission to use it?

I can see this issue becoming bigger and bigger. The site scrapes pics from all over the place... and to cover themselves they just credit the site they've taken the pic from.

In the 'share-all' world of the web that might seem fine, but it's nicking other people's content at the end of the day. Photo sites like Flickr do allow you to designate whether a photo can be used by others, but Nextstop just credits Flickr, not the photographer which flies in the face of the way Creative Commons licence is supposed to work.

And it takes pics from all over the place. I can't imagine that say Beerintheevening.com from where lots of pub shots for Brighton (my home town) are taken would willing give copyright consent for the use of their images.

The new generation (ie not old hacks like me) don't really 'get' copyright do they?

I for one will never ever put my shots on Flickr for this very reason. It would be nice to share with people who just want to look at my shots and comment, but if there's a risk someone will try and profit from them, I'm not taking it.

What do you think?