Partial Victory for Perfect 10? 306
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.'"
Question (Score:5, Insightful)
robots.txt? (Score:2, Insightful)
http://www.google.com/webmasters/bot.html#robotsi
Case closed? Oh, sorry, I forgot Google has lots of money.
Re:robots.txt? (Score:2, Insightful)
Devil's Advocate (Score:2, Insightful)
Last time I checked, the law didn't work like that.
Re:robots.txt? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:robots.txt? (Score:4, Insightful)
To me at least, it looks like they should be going after the people that steal their images, not google.
Thumbnails (Score:3, Insightful)
If it is OK for Google to distribute these, why is it illegal for a person to distribute downsampled versions of WAVe files (aka MP3s)?
Re:robots.txt? (Score:2, Insightful)
This case is clearly a gold digging scheme, so here's hoping "Perfect 10" loses.
Re:robots.txt? (Score:2, Insightful)
In which case, yes it is.
Re:Question (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Thumbnails (Score:4, Insightful)
They aren't analogous. An MP3 file is missing much of the information that's in the original uncompressed audio file, but it's still functionally equivalent to the original; you can listen to it, burn it to a CD, mix it with other songs, etc. and in nearly all cases the differences between the MP3 and the original will be imperceptible. The information that's missing is information that your brain can't detect anyway (if the bitrate is reasonable and your encoder does a good job).
A thumbnail image is also missing much of the information from the original, but it's not functionally equivalent. The information that's missing is information that matters. You can't see nearly as much detail in a 128x102 thumbnail as you can in the 1280x1024 original, which severely limits the usefulness of the thumbnail.
Hold on one sec (Score:4, Insightful)
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 [google.com].
(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.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:robots.txt? (Score:3, Insightful)
Like if there is no robots.txt file, it should default to not indexing?
So we should change the entire ruleset that governs robots.txt because one company has their proverbial panties in a wad about their images being ripped off by their own subscribers and then indexed by spiders? Any RFCs you'd like to throw out while you're at it? Maybe we should abandon TCP because that is the mechanism used to transport these images illegally across the internet.
There may be an option to add a no-index header to a jpeg file, maybe in EXIF metadata area which perhaps the search engine could honor. (Or does EXIF already have a copyright flag?) This extends an existing standard without breaking any old ones. Problem is it would be trivial to strip the bit from the file before re-posting.
Google and A9 aren't the only engines which index images. The spiders don't really (and shouldn't, save honoring robots.txt) care what the content is. They just index it so it can be found. Oddly enough, the search engines are what allow most people to find sites like P10. Talk about biting the hand that feeds you. (Okay, search engines and spam.)
Google has deep pockets, so they're a target instead of the people who are actually stealing the images in the first place. I don't like the idea of stuff being ripped off. I like even less the idea of turning a well-established standard on its head. Maybe instead of attacking Google and A9 they should leverage Google, as someone else has already mentioned, to find the infringers and go after them. The pirates would just change their robots file to allow their content to be indexed anyways.
I feel like 99% of the web desperately wants to be on Google, hence it should be opt-out.
No clue what the first part of that means, hence flying monkeys are desperately wanting to come out of my butt (?)
Re:robots.txt? (Score:4, Insightful)
OTH: If Google had even better image search, then the copyright owners could use Google to help track down the people who infringed by copying (not stealing) the images in the first place.
Re:robots.txt? (Score:3, Insightful)
Quoting AGAIN from my post, I believe this is the relevant part. To which you still have to add anything insightful:
As for the adsense thing, if a web page rips off your image, you sue them, not Google. If I steal your image and put it in my magazine you can't sue all the companies who paid me to put their ad in my magazine.
I'm having fun writing tags though.
Re:robots.txt? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Question (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Question (Score:4, Insightful)
Easy solution... (Score:3, Insightful)
Surely this is Perfect 10's problem (Score:2, Insightful)
If they don't want it on google. Don't allow google to index it - there are many ways of doing this (don't link to it publically, etc...) If the issue comes from pirated sites, and google indexing them - that's not googles problem, if anything they provide a very useful way for perfect 10 to find the pirated sites.
Why the fuck is this even in a courtroom? Am I entirely mis-understanding their point?
This only hurts Perfect 10 (Score:4, Insightful)
Congrats you've protected your IP but lowered your revenue stream. Good job! *applause*
Re:robots.txt? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Question (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Question (Score:2, Insightful)
Why the fuck can't they just add the following to
User-agent: *
Disallow:
caching can be disabled (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Question (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Question (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:robots.txt? (Score:3, Insightful)
Since this is basically a public opinion discussion forum, we talk about how things SHOULD work, not necessarily how they do. That's supposed to be the point of democracy... rather than waiting for a judge to tell you how things should be, the people figure out what should happen, tell their representatives, then those representatives make laws to tell the judges how things are going to be.
I didn't say that thumbnails were legally excerpts (that would be dumb since I'm not a lawyer, nor a judge), I suggested that they were logically. Since I'm not even a citizen of your country it's entirely up to you, the people, what you do with that suggestion.