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