9th Circuit Court Finds 'Thumbnailing' Fair Use

mark_wilkins writes "A photographer named Leslie Kelly had sued Arriba Soft Corporation for infringing his copyrights to photos when they made thumbnails of his pictures and stored them in a public image search engine. Today the federal 9th Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the district court's ruling that making these thumbnail copies of images for the search engine was 'fair use.' Since the applicability of fair-use defenses to copyright infringement touches on all kinds of common uses of the Internet as well as rulemaking related to the scope of the DMCA, this decision will probably have an effect on the discussion. (Note that this case was decided by a 3-judge panel and thus isn't binding precedent.)" Note that the court also reversed in part the lower court's ruling, specifically saying that the lower court should not have ruled on "whether the display of the larger image is a violation of Kelly's exclusive right to publically display his works."

Comments

Good

[Anonymous Coward]

Hopefully the RIAA wont object to me distributing thumbnails of music as MP3's

One small step for law, one giant leap for freedom!

Re:Good

[dead sun]

So then if tons of people took different 30 second clips and posted them, with said links, maybe we could create some software to grab enough clips to reconstruct. The grabbing the clips couldn't be inherently illegal since we're allowed to harmlessly do so now. Probably the process of reconstruction would be made to be the illegal act. However, if that takes place client side, the RIAA would be hard pressed to track illegal downloaders, since the downloading aspect wouldn't be illegal. Then maybe they'd have to come up with ideas to really pester fans.

Courts

[inertia187]

Oh great. Another ruling from the most overturned appellate court ever.
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