Court Rules Google Infringes On Porn
In what could be terrible news for the sad few who rely on Google Images for porn, a court has ruled that some aspects of Image Search infringe on copyrights of porn site Perfect 10. Basically, the judge has ordered both sides to craft a narrow preliminary injunction that will likely prevent Google from showing image thumbnails of images stolen by other websites that are indexed in images, but that does not infringe on Google’s right to link to those images.
While the law is perfectly clear that Google is not responsible when sites in its index infringe on copyrights, I can understand how thumbnails of copyrighted images would be unlawful. Why doesn’t Google do the same thing it does when it gets DMCA requests against pages in search results that contain software that violates copyrights? Why can’t it just remove the images from the index and include a notice on the page?
Daniel Cooper, Perfect 10’s general counsel, called the ruling a victory regarding the search portion of the case and said his company would prevail on the rest of the matter at trial.
“Once we get the evidence we are fighting hard to get, we’re hopeful we will ultimately prevail on that aspect of the case as well,” Cooper said.
Perfect 10, based in Beverly Hills, publishes a magazine and a Web site that sells access to thousands of photos of nude women.
The company sued Google in 2004 and Amazon.com Inc., which runs the A9 search engine, last year. The cases were consolidated. The court said it will issue a separate order in regard to Amazon, which licenses much of Google’s technology.
“While we’re disappointed with portions of the ruling, we are pleased with Judge Matz’s favorable ruling on linking and other aspects of Google image search,” Google spokesman Michael Kwun said.
“We anticipate that any preliminary injunction will have no effect on the vast majority of image searches and will affect only searches related to Perfect 10.”
