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Internet Google Not Guilty for Displaying Explicit Images
Tuan Nguyen (Blog) - May 16, 2007 4:00 PM

17 comment(s) - last by Milliamp.. on May 18 at 1:11 AM

Appeals court removes injunction on Google displaying images from adult website

Early last year, an adult entertainment website called Perfect 10 filed a lawsuit against Google for displaying thumbnails and subsequent images from its website. Perfect 10 at the time claimed that a portion of its revenue came from selling thumbnails to mobile phone users. By ruling of U.S. district judge Howard Matz, Google was found to be in violation of copyright laws.

This week, however, a U.S. appeals court ruled that while Google did violate copyright laws, it did so involuntarily. A panel of three judges reversed the decision made by the district court and said that Google may continue operating as normal.

"We reverse the district court's ruling and vacate the preliminary injunction regarding Google's use of thumbnail versions of Perfect 10's images. We reverse the district court's rejection of the claims that Google and Amazon.com are secondarily liable for infringement of Perfect 10's full size images," said Sandra Ikuta.

A judge on the ruling panel indicated that public benefits of Google's searching services outweigh that of the claims made by Perfect 10.

"We conclude that the significantly transformative nature of Google's search engine, particularly in light of its public benefit, outweighs Google's superseding and commercial uses of the thumbnails in this case," wrote the judge.

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Huh?

By Scorpion on 5/16/2007 4:54:48 PM , Rating: 5

Are there not fairly obvious steps that this company "Perfect 10" could have taken to prevent search bots and image aggregators from having access to these images? Search bots do not break into websites, from what I know. If the bots can find it then anyone has free access to it. Therefore, if you don't want someone to have free access to something, lock it up! I just don't understand the thought process behind this lawsuit. At least Google won the appeal, for good reason.

RE: Huh?

By darkpaw on 5/16/2007 5:55:15 PM , Rating: 5

Correct, if you have a public folder you don't want crawled you can drop a norobots.txt file in and all major search engines will skip it.

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RE: Huh?

By Milliamp on 5/18/2007 1:11:56 AM , Rating: 2

You can check http://google.com/robots.txt for an example, and this is pretty common knowledge.

The best part, you get a 404 when checking perfect 10 for the same file.

Although, I believe a large portion of the claim was Google archiving thumbnails from sites that didn't have permission to use their photos in the first place.

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RE: Huh?

By daftrok on 5/16/2007 7:18:55 PM , Rating: 4

I think Perfect 10 knew and they were trying to snag some cash from Google on a loophole...but it didn't work because Google pwns bitches.

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RE: Huh?

By Dactyl on 5/16/2007 8:46:17 PM , Rating: 3

I just don't understand the thought process behind this lawsuit.

Google has billions of dollars

That's a great reason to sue anybody

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RE: Huh?

By Wolfpup on 5/17/2007 1:37:31 AM , Rating: 2

That's a REALLY good point!

I'm REALLY glad that common sense finally prevailed in one of these cases.

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RE: Huh?

By syphon on 5/17/2007 9:04:36 AM , Rating: 2

Yeah basically you can fully control what content a search engine bot can find. I do SEO for a marketing company and have studied Robots.txt files in depth. Its very easy to create one and there are even scripts online that will create one for you free! Even with that, with very little knowledge of programming you can create one that blocks certain wild cards, directories, file types, etc. Just because this Perfect 10 site didn't protect their data shouldn't mean they deserve to win the lawsuit.

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What about the LAW!??

By HueyD on 5/16/2007 4:54:10 PM , Rating: 1

So it has nothing to do with the law!!! So basically they are saying, "we really like Google, and everyone uses it, so they can keep on breaking copyright laws".

RE: What about the LAW!??

By someguy123 on 5/16/2007 5:00:37 PM , Rating: 5

uh, no. google isn't the one breaking the law, its just their search engine randomly finding the pictures. considering the hundreds of millions of people on the internet posting everything in sight it'd be impossible to stop every instance of someone else breaking copyright laws and google randomly picking it up through their search engine. its not like google found some porn and decided to host it on their website for cashflow.

the only people that can be held accountable are the people whos sites host the actual thumbnails.

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RE: What about the LAW!??

By Zurtex on 5/16/2007 5:00:40 PM , Rating: 3

My understanding is you can code a page to carefully interact with Google's bot, it's not Googles fault they didn't tell it not to index the images or whatever.

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RE: What about the LAW!??

By Topweasel on 5/16/2007 5:06:39 PM , Rating: 6

No they are saying that its use by the public as free medium for information, outweighs the value of the thumbnail and pictures scooped up by Google. Specially since there is functionality to disable Google from grabbing that information from them.

The information gathered (the pictures) is freely available on the net and at most Google holds and makes available a low rez low size low quality version of the original and provides a link to the full size picture on the originators website, where its being hosted, and would have their own sponsors, and connection fees.

Basically Perfect 10 is whining solely because these picture might be used for cellphones and forum Avatars. Really this is more of a quest to prove that they are actively trying to protect their property so that it stays their property and doesn't enter the open domain territory.

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RE: What about the LAW!??

By Zirconium on 5/16/2007 5:51:09 PM , Rating: 2

You hit the nail on the head.

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RE: What about the LAW!??

By marvdmartian on 5/17/2007 11:02:38 AM , Rating: 2

Yeah, this would be no different than if you went to perfect10's website, saw the thumbnail there, and knew how to put it on your phone. While their intention is to sell you the image, if they publicly display it, in a non-protected area of their website, then it should be considered a public image (unless, of course, you're profiting off your use of their image, which google was not).
In other words, the appeals panel realized it was a frivolous lawsuit.

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that girls pretty hot

By bubbacub616 on 5/16/2007 4:45:37 PM , Rating: 5

hmmn

Nice headline

By aikend on 5/16/2007 10:05:07 PM , Rating: 2

...um, was Google accused of "displaying explicit images"?

I mean, we all like porn and stuff, but wouldn't "Google found not guilty of copyright infringement" be more accurate?