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Google Wins Nude Thumbnail Legal Battle
eldavojohn writes "Google is currently fighting many fronts in its ability to show small images returned in a search from websites. Most recently, Google won the case against them in which they were displaying nude thumbnails of a photographer's work from his site. Prior to this, Google was barred from displaying copyrighted content, even when linking it to the site (owner) from its search results. The verdict: "Saying the District Court erred, the San Francisco-based appeals court ruled that Google could legally display those images under the fair use doctrine of copyright law." This sets a rather hefty precedence in a search engine's ability to blindly serve content safely under fair use."
For many years, Google has shown snippets of a website's likely copyrighted text. Is this really any different from a legal standpoint?
Hax-fu?
If you don't want your page to show up in google, send the robot home. They actually honor that, ya know.
If you don't know how to use it, well, then maybe you should not display your content on the internet. It will survive without.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Is this really any different from a legal standpoint?
Yes, because now a court has ruled that it is legal.
If Google gets fair use, others will too. This helps to chip away at the damage the DMCA (and a few very uneducated court rulings) has done.
The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals undid a preliminary injunction, issued last year by a Los Angeles District Court, that had kept the Web search giant from displaying thumbnail-size photographs of images owned by Perfect 10 Inc. that other sites had improperly posted.
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So in theory I could display google's logo in a prominent place on my webpage and use it as a logo, as long as it links back to their page..
If they complain, its just a thumbnail.. cool.
In the UK, we have a parallel situation with phone numbers. Anyone can 'search' for them in a phone book, but it is up to you to voluntarily opt out (ex directory). Unfortunately, several companies choose to ignore the opt-out listings ! It seems reasonable that the web directory (google) has a similar mechanism for avoiding unwanted listing (robots.txt).
"I am not bound to please thee with my answers" [William Shakespeare]
is millions of 13 year olds cheering, as their first taste of pr0n surfing remains within their grasp.
Between the falling angel and the rising ape
Hax-fu?
this appears to be a case of fair use over copyrighted work. So why's the nudity a part of the article headline?
This is more than a victory for Google. It's even more than a victory free speech. It's a victory for copyright law reform and a victory for anybody fighting a battle for free distribution of content over the internet.
And it's of course a victory for all of us who like teh boobays.
Pulp Audio Weekly - Geek News and Reviews
This is a really good thing, it sets a good precedent and so on and so forth, and is probably news worth posting on its own merit. Why must we promote it with "nude thumbnails" in the title? I mean, you should only add an empty promise of porn if the story can't stand on its own. With an interesting story, it's just distracting.
Main difference is the protection for text and video is the ability to fairly take a portion of the entire copyrighted piece. With a still photo, even though it's a smaller version, it's still the ENTIRE image, which on the surface seems to go against the definition of "All Rights Reserved". The question a court has to consider, is if that thumbnail, that smaller version, in any way detracts or takes away anything from the original (and not just commercial, there's an artistic value to it as well.) For this case, I think specifically as a search engine function, the court says meh, you're fine.
In fact, as a test of Fair Use, it isn't clear if the wholesale simple shrinking of an image to smaller size is in itself fair game, or if it is just within the specific context of a search engine.
Makes me wonder what this means for the Google Books thingamajig.
In a past story, we got links to all kinds of piracy websites, but this time we get no links to pr0n... Am I missing something? Since when is linking to pr0n any more taboo than linking to piracy?
Give Kashyyyk back to the Wookies
I mean, I don't know about you, but my thumbnails are always nude? Since when is this an issue?
My Greatest Heist - Muisc partly inspired by the unbeatable Qwantz
Hey, there must be one country one court that rule against you. These are meaningless fights.
Lobby, lobby, spin the news, (mis)lead the public, and then go to legislator, make new international convention, then you are secured.
Check it out on Justin.tv right now live.
A thumbnail doesn't give you the full detail of a full-sized image. Try to scale it up and you get pixellated garbage.
I'm glad people can't be banned from /. Of course, you always have that 'foe' option to quell a pesky poster, but so far, I haven't had to use it... the moderation system works quite well. Could such a system be applied to the Web, through a 3rd party service like /.?
Beer is proof that God loves us, and wants us to be happy.
Couldn't the photographer have a robot.txt file in the website root directory to tell the robots to leave the image directory alone? That's what I do for my website to keep my pictures off the image search.
This is true and very simple, stay off the internet if you can't take it. How can you want only the benefits of the internet and then bitch when it works like it's supposed to. If you want to control exposure then pay for advertising on television or shut up when your free exposure is out of your control - you get what you pay for.
But when you try to upgrade they take half of everthing you own.
Google puts links to your site on THEIR website.
Spammers put emails in YOUR email box.
Further, when you publish something on the web, it is public by default.
paintball
It's not the detail that matters, it's the entire image that's is in view, not a corner or portion. The court didn't define "thumbnail", either. So thumbnail to one person is small viable image to another. If the original is 3000 pixels wide, is a 400 pixels enough of a reduction to be considered "thumbnail"?
For certain uses, having full resolution doesn't matter. A small version of a porn image, meant only for online viewing to begin with, may be enough to, um, function, for the viewer, degrading the value of the original. I'm not saying I agree with this, I'm just saying there's a difference between taking a paragraph from an entire novel, or a single frame from an episode of The Daily Show, and showing an image in its entirety, except smaller.
Example would be, say, the first exclusive pics of Angelina Jolie's baby. Million dollar shots. Or the first image ever of the iPhone. Priceless. But posting a tiny version online, it would still "reveal" everything that the larger version would, taking that right of publishing/profit/secrecy away from the owner. On a cellphone, a way that many many millions of people are viewing images now, a "thumbnail" is plenty big enough to see all they need to see.
I don't need to print a six foot framed print to hang over my couch. I just want to see Britney nekkid. So there's a difference.
Link, please ;-)
Operator precedence. Legal precedent.
English: learn it and love it!
This *is* slashdot...
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
pics or it didn't happen! ;)
Nobody jerks off to thumbnails... oh and i know, I am an expert in this area.
Even if it is a free registration, this has been reported in many places, it's not hard to find a subscripton-free report, for example: here
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
> Google Wins Nude Thumbnail Legal Battle
e rgey-brin-and-anne-wojcicki-260039.php
Just in time for Sergei Brin's wedding!
http://valleywag.com/tech/wedding-announcements/s
...you agree as an email inbox holder to "opt out" of having a less spam filled mailbox.
If you mean that spammers will take you off their lists if you ask to be removed, following their helpful opt-out link, nope, it doesn't work that way, because spammers tell fibs, the naughty boys. In other words, there is no "opt out".
IANAL, but from what I have gathered about fair use a sign of it being exceeded is if the third-party provides sufficient material that the likely user would not need to seek out the original source. Hence small thumbnails of professional photographs are not infringing.
However - what if the image itself was the size of a smiley? What if Google Image Searching for 'afro smiley' displays an identical copy of the one you would find on a copyrighted, smiley-designing, ad-supported website? In this case the original source _would_ be completely replaced by Google. If a case like that ever comes up the result would be very interesting - either 1. allowing full display of any picture smaller than your average thumbnail, 2. giving carte blanche for copying in the absence of a robots.txt (i.e. you need to take active action to make infringement of your works illegal), or 3. mandating that the thumbnail be either microscopically small or obscured in some way. All of which would be interesting and slashdotworthy news.
...la giaconda on a postage stamp, thumbnails would be toast.
allowing some abusers exploit the commons and demolish it just for the of the concept of "commons" is contradictory and foolish.
Read radical news here
I like being AC, but you are right.. as an AC how would I ban you? You think we got it so easy, us AC's....
What I'm wondering is why go after the intermediate?
Deep pockets.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Get it strait. ;)
The fair use doctrine doesn't seem to require that to me.
And now a court has ruled that it doesn't.
Because if you don't think detail matters, try and watch a movie on an old CGA monitor...
Here. 50 pages but a good read at least for me.
Note that slashdotters are always complaining about judges not knowing anything about computers, but this court has a very good understanding of the relevant technical issues. They are fully aware of which servers are transmitting what data even when this is not immediately apparent to amateur users, and base part of their judgement on that basis.
i like google Free Software Download http://www.populardownload.net/
I am a photographer and I'm glad Google won. I also know how to code my robots.txt, and am thankful Googlebot respects it.
This schmuck is saying "don't steal a cigarette out of my car ashtray just because the window is open". Close it.
I don't see what the big deal about this case is, Kelly v. Arriba Soft Corporation, a case decided by the 9th Circuit in 2002 already said that using a thumbnail image is fair use, is it the fact that it's nude? Thats not really a copyright issue, so much as a it is a decency issue.
Judges prefer using Google to get porn too!
It is, in fact, a tragedy.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
Really, We all won this case. ;-)
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
I always wonder why people post as AC. Since you can create any sort of fake-id on /. you want, with no public e-mail, etc, what are the benefits of being AC? The down-side of having to start at score 0 seems like a good reason to set up a dummy ID.
Beer is proof that God loves us, and wants us to be happy.
For me, reason no. 1 is the hassle. I wouldn't want to keep track of which of multiple IDs I'd be logged in as. So I'm always logged in as "myself" and I sure will remember on a case by case basis if I want a certain post to go out as AC.
Of course one might say that my "/. self" can not be traced to "the real me" anyhow, as long as I don't display my real name or e-mail adres. But for quite a few people, my /. account name is enough to know who I am. And even if it isn't, if you use a non-AC account to post stuff about topics that you know about, you slowly build a public profile that eventually allows people who know you in real life to guess who you are. There you have my reason number 2, which is actually more fundamental than no. 1.
Linux user since early January 1992.
IANAL either, but I would expect legislation to make clear that if such a thing could happen, it is the responsibility of the copyright holder to protect their precious work instead of showing it to the whole world and then complain. If that afro smiley is that precious, they should only show it to registered users after a password-protected login. In low resolution. With a user-specific digital fingerprint.
I never understood why there is not a minimum burden on the copyright holder to adequately protect their work before they complain. Nobody is forced to make their stuff available on a publich website and nobody is forced to let their stuff get indexed by search engines.
I do enjoy my foe list, though I just set it at -1 to bump down some folk who I consider trolls, or just don't feel like reading, but not ban them. I just like them a bit further down the page. I also read at 0, with the karma bonus on, so the odds of them being censored are practically nill (who really has bad karma?)
/. But how often to do see unpopular opinions modded troll? Go to a politics or apple discussion and notice how many comments with troll mods REALLY are trolls, and not just differences of opinion. How many things are moderated up just for claiming "I know I'll get modded down for this but..."... And how many comments with a "read the rest of this comment..." footer modded informative, just for being lengthy?
I suppose I COULD censor foes, but that would be silly, since I'm guess that even the people on the list bring something interesting to the table, even if in its negative.
Censorship is generally bad, I would have said universal, but there are glaring things that should be removed, such as child porn, but off the top of my head that is the only thing on the list. The internet is diverse enough to allow us to censor the rest on the fly, you don't like x, then your probably not going to seek out x, which is both a problem and a good thing. A good thing because it allows us to self-censor the web, and thus not inflict our opinion of appropriateness on others. A bad thing because it armors us against opposing views, thus fostering groupthink.
Moderation works well 90% of the time on
On a small scale, though, it is good enough. But i doubt it would translate well to the hugeness, and diversity, of the full web. Though sites like StumbleUpon do rather well...
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
only ignorant, insolent and selfish do that. the others do it out of not being left behind, if they ever do.
Read radical news here
Norm Zada
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Norm Zada (born Norman Zadeh) is the founder of Perfect 10, an adult magazine focusing on women without cosmetic surgery. Zada launched the magazine after a friend was rejected from Playboy magazine because her proportions did not fit the magazine's tastes. [1] He estimates losing approximately $46 million on Perfect 10 since 1996, when the magazine was published.
Recently, his magazine is the plaintiff in Perfect 10 v. Google, Inc., a lawsuit charging contributory copyright infringement through the search engine displaying thumbnails of Perfect 10 images hosted at unauthorized third-party sites. Other lawsuits Zada has filed involve adult verification system supplier Cybernet Ventures, from which he received a confidential settlement, and Visa and Mastercard, where he alleged that these credit card companies benefited from fees charged to access unauthorized material at third-party pay sites.[2]
Prior to starting Perfect 10, he obtained a doctorate in operations research at the University of California, Berkeley and worked at IBM and was an adjunct mathematics professor at Stanford University, Columbia University, UCLA, and UC Irvine, writing textbooks on computer science [3]. After teaching, he became a championship poker player and money manager. [4] Zadeh made headlines in 1996 when he offered $400,000 for anyone successfully refuting Zadeh's claim that balancing the United States federal budget would be an "economic disaster" [5].
He is the son of the creator of fuzzy logic, computer scientist Lofti Zadeh.
And that would ideed be acceptable in most non-USA juridiction. As long as you are
If you are selling music you need to pay an adapted license from your local agency (which in turn should give part of the collected money to the local copyright owners... and not keeping the money as the russian organisation did in the case of AllOfMp3 !).
Otherwise, as long as the seller from witch you got your music from (in this case the Radio) has paid it's diffusion rights it perfectly normal for you to get the music, but also to record it, and swap copies of the show with other citizens (they are covered by distribution rights too as member of the same target audience).
Several TV guides do run a section where people who have missed some show on the TV can ask if someone else in the town has recorded the interesting show and could give them the tape.
From the european point of view, there's no piracy, because the TV channel has paid for the rights to send the show to the whole population.
From the USA crazy point of view, the owner will sue for copyright infringement, because they could earn more money by selling additional copies (DVDs) of the show to people.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
For immediate release -- Google today announced the public beta release of new toolbar functionality designed to detect tiny depictions of human gonads and block them from view in the results to the newly expanded Google Search, which automatically includes searches of Google's Images database. The expanded search capability meant that searches frequently return thumbnail images of naked human bodies.
"People are being bushwhacked by the number of sexual images displayed as thumbnails," said Sergei Brin, who is on his honeymoon and sounded a little tuckered out. "To head off any public outcry and class-action lawsuits, we released 'Nad Blocker for our toolbar. It detects pubic hair, and skin-toned cylinders and crevices, among other things," Brin explained. "We've also developed an areola algorithm that is so good it doesn't get thrown off by piercings."
Standard definition television is not "worse than CGA". CGA in color mode has 320x200p pixels, with one of four predefined colors per pixel. The bandwidth of NTSC TV implies a resolution close to 320x480i luma[1], with chroma somewhat lower. The difference here is that an interlaced signal can show slightly more vertical detail than a progressive signal with the same scan rate, and many more chroma and luma levels are available for each pixel in NTSC than in CGA.
[1] In NTSC, luma is 0 to 3.0 MHz and chroma is 3.0 to 4.2 MHz, and the active time of each scanline is roughly 82% of the 63.555 microsecond horizontal scan period.
You Are Not Lawyers.
Take some time and learn what it means to set precedent for a case.
SanFrancisco Local Appeals Court only sets precedent for the courts under it in that region. Everyone else can look at the case and say, "So?"
Now, if it was for all of California in all of the courts under the Supreme Court - or a whole Circuit or further, now that would be precedent.
As it is, the level of precedent set is miniscule.