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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."

3 of 19 comments (clear)

  1. 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.

    --
    Method of processing duck feet
    1. 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.)

  2. 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.