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Former Penthouse Lawyer On Thumbnails

Posted by timothy on from the this-is-your-brain-on-thumbnails dept.

FullyIonized writes: "Gigalaw.com has an interesting article on the legality of using thumbnail images written by an attorney for Penthouse magazine, who "had to be familiar with the entire Penthouse-catalog of photos and models, and ... proactively surfed the Net in search of kidnapped images." He summarizes an interesting case, and then argues that pr0n thumbnails (among others) are different from other thumbnails."

19 comments

  1. Do we really wannt to know abou this thumbnails? by Unknown+Poltroon · · Score: 1

    I mean, hes memorized the entire mags history of pictures, then spends hours surfing for pr0n? I think we all know more than we need to know aobut his thumbnails.

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  2. Why don't they... by leviramsey · · Score: 2, Funny

    ...recruit for this job at my school? I know I'm qualified!

    1. Re:Why don't they... by sharkey · · Score: 2

      You have to be able to do this for a full workday, without having to stop for a moist towellete and a nap after xx minutes.

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  3. "familiar" by andy@petdance.com · · Score: 3, Funny

    And you thought "video game tester" was a cool job to have.

  4. Funny over exageration. by Deagol · · Score: 3, Informative
    The offending sites spanned the spectrum, from basic home pages where some college student had posted a picture of his favorite Penthouse Pet, to multi-million dollar pornographic pay sites that were stealing virtually the entire catalogue of Penthouse's previously published photos.

    Show me one "multi-million" dollar porn pay site today (never mind in the early-to-mid 90's). From what I hear, due to the glut of porn out there, it doesn't pay that much. Even Playboy's own site is losing money.

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    1. Re:Funny over exageration. by www.sorehands.com · · Score: 1
      Barbie Benson gave me the impression that she is making money on her site. But that could be considering the panty sales too.

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    2. Re:Funny over exageration. by tregoweth · · Score: 2, Informative

      While adult sites aren't doing as well as they did a few years ago (when there weren't so freakin' many), the top ones still do pretty well. Playboy's is actually one of the few big adult sites that has never been profitable. (Reportedly, Penthouse's pay site became profitable the day it opened.)

  5. Like music and movies... by Deagol · · Score: 2
    ... give us what we want.

    I fully support the scan scene. They provide a service that none of the big publishers do: indexed, full catalogs of the magazines (well, at least the pics, for now). I would pony up probably $100-$200 for a DVD of every issue of Playboy, complete with pics, ads, and articles. I think PDFs would be awesome, but an HTML layout would be nice, too. I'm sure a lot of the porn fanboys would agree.

    Actually, I wish the ebook scene (the ones who scan novels and post as decent PDFs or HTML collections on P2P) would do this for magazines of all sorts.

    My point (a little remote, I admit) is that these companies shouldn't go after people who scan/post pics. Yeah, maybe the ones making money, but not the little guys. After all, they actually purchase the materials to scan. And I would bet a large market for these scans are -- you guessed it -- under-aged boys, so there is no legit market for them anyway.

    The lawyer does raise the decent point that thubnails may (maybe) satisfy the market need for the product, thus hurting sales of the real product. I have to wonder... if there was absolutely no way to get nudies online without paying, would the online porn industry really do any better? I personally tend to think it would not.

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    1. Re:Like music and movies... by Teun · · Score: 2

      Huh?, Playboy interesting for porn fans? Playboy might be for an adult (~16) group of readers but where's the porn?

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    2. Re:Like music and movies... by gopherdata · · Score: 1

      There is actually big debate within the adult webmaster community about the availability of free porn (ie via TGPs) hurting paysites and their affiliates.

      Here's a thread about it from an adult forum:
      http://bbs.adultwebmasterinfo.com/ubb/ulti matebb.p hp?ubb=get_topic;f=1;t=014029

  6. Good piece. by www.sorehands.com · · Score: 2
    In general, it is a good piece.

    I think he does take a little liberty with the decision. He takes the position that providing an in-line link is infringment. I disagree, the court ruled that a framed, in-line image is infringment. The difference is that framing the image is an affirmative act in giving the impression that the image is part of the site belonging to the thumbnailer, not the site of the copyright holder. Just putting a link to the image without framing may give the impression, but is not an affirmative act to give the impression.

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  7. "hands-on" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
    Finding Penthouse-owned pictures required some hands-on investigative work.

    Hehe...I can guess what he had his "hands on".

  8. Thumbnail etiquette by infernalC · · Score: 2, Informative

    One of the greatest features of HTML/XHTML is the ability to reference any object accessible via http within a document using an object element or an image element. However, to say that such an object is embedded in a document is not accurate. It is referenced by the document. Browsers may or may not choose to display referenced objects.

    I think that image indexing services like Google, or any other web content creator, would not be violating any sort of copyright laws if they simply referenced the original images and let the browsers scale them to thumbnail size. I suspect they do not do this because browsers' resampling algorithms suck and images take loads of time to download; therefore, users would be dissatisfied with search results pages loading times.

    I think that works placed on public http servers are inherently permissibly copyable: since the only way people can look at them is to obtain a copy in the first place, the content creator meant for the work to be copied in the first place.

    1. Re:Thumbnail etiquette by J'raxis · · Score: 1

      Wrong, they cache the images. Have you ever noticed that images will come up on the search results page but then break when you view the framed image? Thats because Google caches copies for the search results. (The image on the subsequent framed page breaks because maybe its 404ed, or the site checks referrers, or whatever.)

      An apropòs example.

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  9. Thumbnails needed by KeatonMill · · Score: 1

    Thumbnails for ANY sizable picture, pr0n or no, are needed, in my opinion. Without them, no 56K user really has a chance to surf large sites, because high-quality pictures usually take upwards of 50K, which doesn't download immediately. Thumbnails also help reduce internet traffic, by reducing the amount of "required" content. Without thumbnails, each full picture must be transmitted, which takes a lot of bandwidth (not only for the user, but the server). However, thumbnails minimize this required download amount. If the user likes the thumbnail, the larger version can be viewed as well.

    1. Re:Thumbnails needed by decesses · · Score: 1

      Now if only flash etc etc etc developers could keep this in mind when designing sites the web would be a much better place.

  10. Multi-Million Dollar Websites by gopherdata · · Score: 1

    Here's a short list of adult websites (or groups of websites) that are easily worth over a million dollars.

    http://www.cybererotica.com
    http://www.karasxxx .com
    http://www.ifriends.com
    http://www.gammae.com
    http://www.adultrevenuese rvice.com
    http://www.sexaddicted.com
    http://www. pythonvideo.com
    http://www.pornholio.com