Partial Victory for Perfect 10?

An anonymous reader writes "Internet News is reporting that a recent statement made by district court judge A. Howard Matz has declared a partial victory for Perfect 10 in their efforts to stop search engines from displaying their photos in an image search. From the article: 'Perfect 10 is likely to succeed in proving that Google directly infringes its copyright by creating and displaying thumbnail copies of its photographs. Perfect 10's copyright infringement case may take years to wend its way through the courts. But a victory could hamstring image search, along with video and audio search services.'"

Comments

Question

[HeavensBlade23]

How is an image search substantially different than a text search? Wouldn't making a thumbnail with a link to the original image fall under fair use, the same as google cache or even the partial webpage text displayed in a regular google query?

Re:Question

[ScrappyLaptop]

Interesting, but I would consider a greatly reduced resolution picture to be the equivelent of an excerpt. Think of it this way; you are getting only every 100th pel, or 1/100th of the original work. That also fits the definition of an excerpt, don't you think? A lower resolution thumbnail taken in this respect IS a stylized, modified alias of the original work.

Re:Question

[mikkom]

Usually framing of other peoples content for your site is also concidered to be strictly not okay and google is doing exactly that with their image search.

Re:Question

[wheany]

Google image search creates the thumbnails from bigger pictures available in the web for free. There is no value to be diluted. Anyone could take those same pictures and resize them and put them on their mobile phones. Except if they don't have the skills to do so or have a shitty phone.

Re:Question

[LinuxGeek]

Ok, I have to admit to being a tad confused over this issue. Google is only indexing and thumbnailing what is publicly available from the perfect10 site, correct? Then they are concerned that google is saving me a single step in doing the same thing? I could go download the publicly available artwork and shrink it for my phone and leave google completely out of the loop.

Re:Question

[hackstraw]

Why the fuck can't they just add the following to /robots.txt, and save the time money of legal expenses?

User-agent: *
Disallow: /pictures

Re:Question

[Anonymous Coward]

So,what are you trying to say? You think that google is paying them $25.50 per month to crawl their website so they can index their images? No. Google is crawling the PUBLICLY AVAILABLE, UNRESTRICTED PORTION OF THEIR WEB SITE. If Google can see it, I can take my browser there directly and get it WITHOUT paying $25.50 per month. It would seem they are depriving themselves of the revenue. They need to secure the pictures if they want to make people pay to see them.

Re:Question

[jandrese]

But the thumbnails are still available from the internet without paying the $25.50 (I can guarentee Google doesn't sign up for sites like this just to index them). It seems to me Perfect 10 is sueing Google because they have a retarded business model that wasn't working anyway.

robots.txt?

[Evro]

Couldn't they just tell Googlebot not to index their images via robots.txt?

http://www.google.com/webmasters/bot.html#robotsin fo

Case closed? Oh, sorry, I forgot Google has lots of money.

Re:robots.txt?

[Pinefresh]

so you have to opt out of having your copyrights being violated?

Re:robots.txt?

[ZachPruckowski]

Maybe something like this should be opt-in? Like if there is no robots.txt file, it should default to not indexing? Personally, I feel like 99% of the web desperately wants to be on Google, hence it should be opt-out.

Re:robots.txt?

[Embedded2004]

The problem in this case is that people rip their images and post them on other sites. Which google then spiders, so their unable to disable the spidering of their property.

To me at least, it looks like they should be going after the people that steal their images, not google.

Re:robots.txt?

[Penguinoflight]

The grand assumption is that most will want their website indexed. Of course if someone is determined enough to keep their site from being indexed/copied by google, they should have used the robots file. Copyrights are always something you have to protect yourself; Perfect 10 skipped quite a few steps involved in protecting their copyright and went straight to suing google.

This case is clearly a gold digging scheme, so here's hoping "Perfect 10" loses.

Re:robots.txt?

[Anonymous Coward]

More like, "If I don't close my blinds, it's ok to look at me naked in my bedroom."
In which case, yes it is.

Re:robots.txt?

[DrEldarion]

They don't make money directly off image search - there aren't any adwords displayed on it.

If you're talking about adwords on the sites that stole P10's images, then Google isn't the one infringing on the copyright, so they shouldn't be held liable.

Re:robots.txt?

[horatio]

TFA kind of obscures the fact a little that P10 isn't complaining so much about Google indexing their site per-se, but rather sites of people who have ripped off P10's images and reposted them elsewhere.

Like if there is no robots.txt file, it should default to not indexing?

So we should change the entire ruleset that governs robots.txt because one company has their proverbial panties in a wad about their images being ripped off by their own subscribers and then indexed by spiders? Any RFCs you'd like to throw out while you're at it? Maybe we should abandon TCP because that is the mechanism used to transport these images illegally across the internet.

There may be an option to add a no-index header to a jpeg file, maybe in EXIF metadata area which perhaps the search engine could honor. (Or does EXIF already have a copyright flag?) This extends an existing standard without breaking any old ones. Problem is it would be trivial to strip the bit from the file before re-posting.

Google and A9 aren't the only engines which index images. The spiders don't really (and shouldn't, save honoring robots.txt) care what the content is. They just index it so it can be found. Oddly enough, the search engines are what allow most people to find sites like P10. Talk about biting the hand that feeds you. (Okay, search engines and spam.)

Google has deep pockets, so they're a target instead of the people who are actually stealing the images in the first place. I don't like the idea of stuff being ripped off. I like even less the idea of turning a well-established standard on its head. Maybe instead of attacking Google and A9 they should leverage Google, as someone else has already mentioned, to find the infringers and go after them. The pirates would just change their robots file to allow their content to be indexed anyways.

I feel like 99% of the web desperately wants to be on Google, hence it should be opt-out.

No clue what the first part of that means, hence flying monkeys are desperately wanting to come out of my butt (?)

Re:robots.txt?

[RodgerDodger]

The real question is: How is Google meant to identify that the images come from Perfect 10? Google is no more capable of recognising the copyright theft than it is of recognising someone plagarising from a NYT article (and violating copyright that way).

OTH: If Google had even better image search, then the copyright owners could use Google to help track down the people who infringed by copying (not stealing) the images in the first place.

Re:robots.txt?

[ceoyoyo]

So what you're saying is that Google is getting sued for something some random third party on the Internet did? Seems kind of silly, no?

Quoting AGAIN from my post, I believe this is the relevant part. To which you still have to add anything insightful:

As for the adsense thing, if a web page rips off your image, you sue them, not Google. If I steal your image and put it in my magazine you can't sue all the companies who paid me to put their ad in my magazine.

I'm having fun writing tags though.

Re:robots.txt?

[hazem]

The funny thing is... how would they find the other websites infringing on their works without searching for them on Google?

Re:robots.txt?

[Evro]

No, it's more like saying, "If I put something on the public internet, it's OK for any user agent to fetch it unless I tell them not to."

Re:robots.txt?

[ceoyoyo]

If I were setting up a business like Google then I would agree with you -- figure out what the law actually is.

Since this is basically a public opinion discussion forum, we talk about how things SHOULD work, not necessarily how they do. That's supposed to be the point of democracy... rather than waiting for a judge to tell you how things should be, the people figure out what should happen, tell their representatives, then those representatives make laws to tell the judges how things are going to be.

I didn't say that thumbnails were legally excerpts (that would be dumb since I'm not a lawyer, nor a judge), I suggested that they were logically. Since I'm not even a citizen of your country it's entirely up to you, the people, what you do with that suggestion.

Devil's Advocate

[Geekenstein]

So essentially, you're saying the onus is on copyright holder to tell someone not to steal their product?

Last time I checked, the law didn't work like that.

Thumbnails

[Quixote]

A thumbnail (which Google Image Search displays) is just a downsampled version of the original image.
If it is OK for Google to distribute these, why is it illegal for a person to distribute downsampled versions of WAVe files (aka MP3s)?

Re:Thumbnails

[Mr2001]

If it is OK for Google to distribute [downsampled versions of original images], why is it illegal for a person to distribute downsampled versions of WAVe files (aka MP3s)?

They aren't analogous. An MP3 file is missing much of the information that's in the original uncompressed audio file, but it's still functionally equivalent to the original; you can listen to it, burn it to a CD, mix it with other songs, etc. and in nearly all cases the differences between the MP3 and the original will be imperceptible. The information that's missing is information that your brain can't detect anyway (if the bitrate is reasonable and your encoder does a good job).

A thumbnail image is also missing much of the information from the original, but it's not functionally equivalent. The information that's missing is information that matters. You can't see nearly as much detail in a 128x102 thumbnail as you can in the 1280x1024 original, which severely limits the usefulness of the thumbnail.

Hold on one sec

[gargletheape]

So basically these Charlies sue Google because other websites pirate their content, and some of these have (gasp!) Google ads. Wow.

And in any case, since when did it become necessary for a search engine to know that its searches link to content that violates someone's copyrights? I mean, even the RIAA wouldn't sue Google just because I can do searches like:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&c2coff=1&q= -inurl%3Ahtm+-inurl%3Ahtml+intitle%3A%22index+of%2 2+mp3+%22pearl+jam%22&btnG=Searchthis.

(Not that they wouldn't like to try...)

All Google needs to do is to remove links to infringing sites when these are brought to its notice, and even there it is allowed to display the actual complaint with the list of bad URL's.

Easy solution...

[poptones]

Watermark all the thumbnails. Google could put a big "Gooogle" watermark across every one of its thumbnails and it would not degrade the usability of the image search itself. It would, however, pretty much destroy the value of the thumbnails as cellphone wallpaper.

Surely this is Perfect 10's problem

[harryman100]

Can't they just use a robots.txt to prevent google from indexing the images? If google can get at the content (without paying) then surely so can anyone else anyway.

If they don't want it on google. Don't allow google to index it - there are many ways of doing this (don't link to it publically, etc...) If the issue comes from pirated sites, and google indexing them - that's not googles problem, if anything they provide a very useful way for perfect 10 to find the pirated sites.

Why the fuck is this even in a courtroom? Am I entirely mis-understanding their point?

This only hurts Perfect 10

[harl]

Perfect 10 wins suit. Perfect 10 no longer has images on the search engines. Perfect 10 receives less traffic since people can't tell what's on their site. Less people sign up for the sight or buy the magazine. Revenew goes down.

Congrats you've protected your IP but lowered your revenue stream. Good job! *applause*

caching can be disabled

[jasonhamilton]

Google will read your page for some meta tags and will not cache your pages if you request it not to.