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

A non-SFW warning would be nice

[MarkChovain]

Hmm.. I just decided to take a look at what this "perfect10.com" site is all about, and my boss walked by at that exact moment. I don't know what other people's employers are like with their web-surfing policies, but I am the tech guy for the head-office of a women's rights lobby group, and our policies are pretty clear. What I'm wondering is, is there any way for me the vote of confidence I would say that there are a tool, folks?

About time too

[squoozer]

I know that I'm not the only producer of content that is fed up with the way search engines (Google in particular) can get away with republishing our work and not paying for it. I 110% support fair use and I think a little context snippet with the search result constitutes fair use. I don't, however, feel that caching an entire page and allowing people to view it constitues fair use. In the RW (and I know normally RW analogies don't work very well but I think they do here) it would be the equivalent of reproducing an entire article from a magazine or news paper. I am 100% certain you would be sued if you tried that.

The only two arguments people who support caching seem to be able to give is that: 1) Google makes it clear that it is not the producer of the content 2) It's good for "humanity" because if the site goes down the content is still accessible. As for the first - I don't care if they attribute it to me they didn't write it and I didn't give them permission to publish it. The second is just laughable - it is a defence that could be used to just take any and all work off producers.