Federal Judge Wants Google’s Thumbnails Clipped
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Written By Reprise Media | February 22, 2006 | Share This
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Is image search in danger of going dark? News.com says that a US District Judge in Los Angeles has sided with adult entertainment company Perfect 10 in its copyright infringement suit against Google. A. Howard Matz issued a preliminary injunction against Google’s practice of reducing digital pictures publicly available on other websites - in this case those owned by Perfect 10 - to ‘thumbnail’ sized graphics that are returned in image search queries (a standard practice in image search); Google plans to appeal.
Although a previous ruling had determined that image search thumbnails were protected under the fair use exception, the Perfect 10 vs. Google case is a wee bit more complicated
than that. The issue is that Google was indexing photos owned by Perfect 10 but made available on pirate sites that had stolen and profited from the prurient material. Another point was that some of the rip-off artists were Google AdSense users, and therefore Google had actually made money, in a roundabout way, from the infringement of Perfect 10’s copyrights. The judge also determined that Google’s mobile image search was cutting into Perfect 10’s business, since the mobile “thumbnail images are essentially the same size and of the same quality as the reduced-size images that (Perfect 10) licenses to Fonestarz,” a UK mobile firm, for a subscription-based cell phone service.
For its part, Google could have done a better job in court. They made the prudishly weird argument that Perfect 10’s nude photos couldn’t be construed as art, which the court rejected, writing that “the P10 photographs consistently reflect professional, skillful, and sometimes tasteful artistry.” Uh…thanks, judge. And while Google did everything in its power to remove infringing sites from their search index when Perfect 10 complained about them, the search giant inexplicably failed to provide substantial evidence that it kicked pirating sites out of its AdSense program.
We won’t know the full implications of the ruling for months; that’s several court dates (and possbily a trial) down the road. But bloggers, while sensitive to the rights of content owners, are generally scoffing. Google BlogoScoped says, “If image search thumbnails aren’t fair use, then what’s the Google cache” - legally protected by a recent ruling - “where full pages are being republished?” And Paul Kedrosky calls the court’s opinion “absurd,” likening Google to a utility: “It cannot and should not be held liable for every use to which its customers put electric power. In other words, just because someone puts some copyrighted images (not theirs) on the web, and then Google Image Search finds them and thumbnails them, does not make Google an infringer, nor a party to infringing.” We agree; and after all, would an image search that can’t display images be good for anyone?
Topics: Search: Image |
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