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.'"
Re:Question (Score:5, Interesting)
They are displaying the entire copyrighted work not an excerpt. The owner has legal control of where and how the work is displayed. They would have to recieve permission to use the work in any form. A thumbnail is still the image itself just greatly reduced. They might get away with showing a modified alias of the work where it's stylized in some way but that's the only way around the issue I can think of.
Local cache (Score:2, Interesting)
Also by the same logic, am I thieving when I access text on their site? Is google breaking copyright when it provides the first sentence or so from each result on a search?
RTF Search Notes! (Score:3, Interesting)
Not "Thumbnail (C) 2006 Google, original (C) whoever actually owns it."
This is like being sued by a museum because you remember what a painting looks without having bought another ticket.
Re:robots.txt? (Score:2, Interesting)
Or does Google's spider pay for a membership and then enter it's password so it can enter the member's area? That would be wrong.
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.
Watermark ? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Question (Score:2, Interesting)
The tricky bit here is that they are arguing that the thumbnails have the same resolution and quality as photos that they sell to be displayed on mobile phones, meaning they have an inherent value.
Of course, Google is not using them in the same manner, but one could argue that by displaying the thumbnails, Google is diluting the value (for example, for those people who use Google Image Search from their mobile).
Re:Question (Score:3, Interesting)
So, if you want to stop google from scanning and indexing all the books you want which are copyrighted, all you need to do is to offer every phrase in the book for, say, $5.99/use for fortune cookie manufacturers or even mobile phones. I bet the cost of a low-traffic server (thanks to the ridiculously high price) with the online shop for that would be a hell of a lot cheaper than the lawyers.
Re:robots.txt? (Score:3, Interesting)
Unless an Image thumbnail is defined or has precedence as being used under the guise of being equivalent to an excerpt in a court of law - this "common sense" definition is worthless.
Now, I do not know if thumbnail images have been recognized as equivalent to excerpts in US courts - I'm just pointing out that it is unsound to make "logical" assumptions about things concerning law, because law is about interpretation.
Re:Robots? (Score:2, Interesting)
Disallow:
Disallow:
And use your
RewriteEngine on
# Prevent Image theft
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www/ [www]\.)?|(portal\.)?)yoursite.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule \.(gif|jpg|mpg|mp3|pdf)$ http://www.yoursite.com/rude_image_for_thiefs.gif [yoursite.com] [R,L]
Duh!