Slashdot Mirror
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."
Good question. All the copyright images that I use on my site are shrunk 99% of their original size before uploading...because I lawfully only publish thumbnails.
I said exactly this last time /. posted this story, and now I've actually automated similar systems, so I'll repeat it more loudly this time. OK Mr. Kelly, are you listening?
:(
watermark your images
You can create yourself an action in Photoshop, or there's at least two very good free software packages that can do the same thing (Gimp and ImageMagick). If you don't want the whole world grabbing your images,
don't publish them on the web
at least, not without putting some kind of protection in front of them.
There are well known solutions to this guys problem, and he choses the courts?! I guess that's really the American way
std::disclaimer<std::legalese> sig=new std::disclaimer; sig->dump(); delete sig;
That wasn't an issue even when fair use was an unquestioned law. If you were to reproduce an entire short story in the form of 2 line quotes, no one in their right mind would believe you're not violating the copyright.
I think you're right in the sense that a "thumbnail" is arbitrary, but I think that if the court did state some metrics, the problem would be pretty much solved. At least when it comes to pictures.
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
False. I can't believe this is in the story header, it should be changed immediately. Appellate courts like the 9th Circuit generate binding precedent every time they publish an opinion (some other appellate courts also generate precedent through unpublished opinions).
Sure, it's on the lowest rung of binding precedent. It can be overruled by an en banc panel, or it can be overruled by the US Supreme Court. But it's still certainly can be cited in other cases.
Not to give any credibility to this site, but
We have to distinguish between published and unpublished opinions in some districts, but the point basically stands.
They weren't displaying a portion of his image, they were displaying his whole image, only smaller. The logical equivalent for music would be the entire song at an extremely low bitrate.
The logical equivalent of a 30 second music clip is to display a portion of the normal resolution image.