By: iCopywriter Senior Editor, Heather Price-Wright

When a Taiwanese man with the surname Lee claimed a dog that had chased and caused injury to his neighbor didn’t belong to him, a judge turned to a high-tech method to debunk the story.

According to the neighbor, a man named Peng, the dog chased him on his bicycle, frightening him. This caused Peng to fall off his bike and hurt his head. He claimed his neighbor, Lee, was the dog’s owner and therefore responsible for the injury due to negligence.

Lee disputed the claim, saying he did not own the dog. But a savvy judge, Song Kuo-chen, noted that in a two-year-old image from Google’s Street View feature, the dog could be seen in Lee’s yard. Therefore, the judge decided, Lee was clearly the dog’s owner, and responsible for his neighbor’s accident. Lee was fined 59,000 Taiwanese dollars, or about $2,000 American.

We’re intrigued (if a little freaked out, privacy-wise) at the idea that Google Street View images might be admissible as evidence, and can think of a few additional uses for the monster search engine’s feature that would really help us out:

• Proof that our neighbors really did steal our Christmas decoration ideas last year. This neighborhood ain’t big enough for the both of us, especially when we both have adorable Santa’s Workshops set up in our garages.
• A whole new way to spy on the hunky dad down the street who runs without his shirt on every morning. Now we don’t even need to get up at 4 a.m. with our binoculars.
• Evidence that the couple next door didn’t have a “family emergency” that kept them from coming to our game night. They were sitting by their fancy new aboveground pool, drinking cocktails, while we ate cold fondue and played Parcheesi against ourselves.
• An indelible and permanent image of that one summer we were actually tan. We’ll never get that sun-kissed glow back, but at least now we can prove it to our friends who insisted it was probably just “freckles bleeding together.”

Can you think of any more creative uses for Google Street View?

Have you checked out iCopywriter.com lately?