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Photographers Want Their Cut From Google's Ebooks
It's not just the writers anymore: carluva writes "The American Society of Media Photographers (ASMP) and several other visual artist groups are suing Google over its digitization of of millions of books, claiming copyright infringement related to images within the books. The photographers initially wanted to be included in the authors' and publishers' class action suit, but filed their own suit after that request was denied. Google and others assert that images are only included in the digital copies when permission has been obtained from the copyright holder."
Why I agree this is probably a huge case of opportunism, The fact remains google are evil bastards in how they are handling this and really they deserve what they get. An system that can take your property and requires you to "opt out" rather than opt in deserves to have as many law suits thrown at it as humanly possible.
I don't see how it is so cut and dried. If these artists have legitimate copyrights and Google is presenting the image in results, it certainly could be argued that is a form of republishing. Whether you agree or not, the issue is not exactly just 'me too.' While there may be an element of that TFA is pretty light on details as to what the plaintiffs are claiming represents unauthorized republishing of their work.
meep
Google recently used some of my photographs on Google News, as the 'headline' photos to represent collected coverage of major stories.
You mean. Google recently used some photographs of yours on Google News, as the 'thumbnail' image to represent the collected coverage of major stories, linking back to the original online newspaper which originally published your photograph.
This fell outside any reasonable definition of fair use.
Who says? You do, but you're a little biased. Aren't you.
This was for-profit publication of photographs that other publishers were paying for the right to use. Google used them for free.
Yes, Google links thumbnails and summary information to online sources. It does the same thing on its search engine, which is also a for-profit operation. And it does this with the robots.txt (or sitemap.xml) permission of the original newspaper that published your photographs. If the original newspaper had just listed the folder in which your photograph was in, and told the googlebot not to index your photograph, then google wouldn't have used your photograph (to make a thumbnail out of it).
It seems your original beef is with the newspapers that published your photographs, not google. I think many would argue that indexing, linking to, publishing the summary information, and automatically making thumbnails, all because the original web site permits you through the robots.txt file, falls well within the purpose of 'fair use'.