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

[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

[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: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: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.

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?

[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?

[hazem]

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

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*