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Partial Victory for Perfect 10?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the responsible-but-not-liable dept.

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.'"

7 of 306 comments (clear)

  1. Question by HeavensBlade23 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?

    1. Re:Question by ScrappyLaptop · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:Question by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

  2. Re:robots.txt? by Embedded2004 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  3. Hold on one sec by gargletheape · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  4. Re:robots.txt? by DrEldarion · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  5. Re:robots.txt? by hazem · · Score: 5, Insightful

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