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:robots.txt?

[hazem]

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