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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.'"
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?
Google could just start hotlinking the pics directly from their site, then resizing them to thumnails in the search.
That wouldn't be copyright infringement, right? Just yanking publicly hosted photographs from their rightful and providing owner.
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.
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/004344.php
The court granted summary judgment in favor of Google on four independent bases:
Serving a webpage from the Google Cache does not constitute direct infringement, because it results from automated, non-volitional activity by Google servers (Field did not allege infringement on the basis of the making of the initial copy by the Googlebot);
Field's conduct (failure to set a "no archive" metatag; posting "allow all" robot.txt header) indicated that he impliedly licensed search engines to archive his web page;
The Google Cache is a fair use; and
The Google Cache qualifies for the DMCA's 512(b) caching "safe harbor" for online service providers.
All of those would seem to equally apply to Google Images' thumbnails cache.
Second, most of the results for searches on his company name or the names of the models he has under contract lead not to Perfect 10 sites, but to sites that have pirated his images.
Finally, the suit claimed that Google should be held liable for helping searchers find sites that display stolen Perfect 10 images because, in many cases, those sites also show Google AdSense contextual ads. "Google not only copies and displays Perfect 10 images itself," the request for the injunction read, "but also links them to Infringing Sites with which Google has partnered and from which Google receives revenue through its AdSense advertising program."
They can ban google via robots, but google still displays their (pirated) images from other sites. Google has lots of money ... but they also make money (adsense) from those copyrighted images, which means fair use doesn't apply (per the judge).
In a fair world, they should be thanking google for making it so easy to track down people who are improperly distributing on their copyrighted images.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
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.
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.
As usual, horray for slashdot: where you can get modded insightful commenting on an article you clearly DID NOT READ.
They are *not* suing google for indexing THEIR web site. They are suing google for indexing OTHER PEOPLE'S websites. Websites that are infringing on their copyright.
I think their legal theory is BS, and yeah it sounds pretty gold-digging to me too. However all you people screaming "duh, robots.txt, LOL!!1!" are missing the point too. You can't put a robots.txt file on a domain you do not control.
Here's the case in a nutshell. Perfect 10's copyrighted images are being appropriated by others. Google indexes them and displays the thumbnails of them. Since Perfect 10 didn't give Google permission to display those images (as you noted in your post, they don't allow Google to index their images), when Google displays the thumbnails they are, under our current copyright laws, breaking the law.
This is similar to the case brought against Kinko's for creating coursepacks (see Basic Books, Inc. v. Kinko's Graphics Corporation. Kinko's made partial copies of course material and sold it to students. Kinko's believed these coursepacks were allowed by educational fair use rules. Kinko's, like Google in this case, didn't make complete copies. They only copied pieces of the material to help students get to the heart of the material. Google doesn't copy the entire copyrighted image, just enough to get the important part. The courts ruled against Kinko's, and the judge here said it's likely the courts will also rule against Google.
The biggest difference is, in the case against Kinko's, they were the ones taking direct action. The Kinko's case would apply more directly if someone had come to Kinko's and said, "Hey, we've got these great coursebooks for sale. If you point people our way, by giving away the first five pages with a link to us, we'll give you five cents for each copy we sell. You have to make copies of the first five pages yourself, though."
There are some other differences, too. Kinko's directly profited, whereas Google only indirectly profits (from advertising). The judge agreed that that part of the case is weak. But you don't have to make money to be infringing a copyright. That may help Google avoid paying as much in damages, but that's about all it means.
The funny thing is... how would they find the other websites infringing on their works without searching for them on Google?