Google loses porn pictures case against Perfect 10
A US federal judge has pronounced that Google may be infringing copyright laws by making copies of photos on sites and including them in Google Images. The judge made this ruling at the request of Perfect 10, a website that offers nude photos of ‘beautiful natural women’. The verdict that has now been handed down by the judge is a preliminary injunction, and the verdict will be final on March 8th. Meanwhile, lawyers from both sides have been given the opportunity to challenge the preliminary ruling. Google has already indicated that the ruling will be appealed and that it will only have minor consequences for its image search capabilities.
Perfect 10 filed for lawsuits in November 2004 and filed for a temporary ruling in August 2005 to stop Google from copying, displaying, and distributing more than 3,000 Perfect 10 photos. The photo producer says it suffers from piracy from people who pay their monthly subscription fees and then distribute the photos on sites indexed by Google. However, this is not the only problem. Google itself earns money through AdSense by further distributing the photos via Google Images. Google also offers a possibility to save resized photos for mobile use, functionality that Perfect 10 itself also offers paid. The photo company is therefore losing money because of Google, it believes.
Despite the fact that Perfect 10 has had great success and is satisfied with the current ruling, the judge ruled in favor of Google on one point, and the photo company is not happy about that. Displaying a small version of the image in a separate frame above the page showing the original in its context does not infringe Perfect 10’s copyright. Google is obviously not satisfied with the vast majority of the ruling, but at the same time indicates that the statements about linking from the Google Images pages have been positively received. However, any changes to the Google Images code will not affect searches other than Perfect 10 content.
It’s interesting to note that this lawsuit is essentially about the same thing as other lawsuits filed against Google. For example, several authors and publishers have started a lawsuit against Google to prevent their books from being scanned in the context of Google Book Search; Google has agreed to measures to prevent this. Google News has also been charged with distributing photos and texts from Agence France Presse news articles; in response, Google pulled the AFP news from its site. And then there is now a verdict in this lawsuit. At the core of all these matters is the question of whether information should be free or whether the legal owners may impose restrictions on its use.