Posted on 05/17/2007 4:51:26 PM PDT by mathprof
A federal appeals court ruled yesterday that Google did not infringe on the copyrights of an adult publishing company by displaying thumbnail images of its nude photographs, handing Internet search companies a victory by allowing the display of such miniature pictures in search results.
Perfect 10, a publisher of sexually explicit magazines and Web sites, sued Google in 2004 for allegedly violating its copyrights, and the case quickly attracted wide attention not just for its adult subject matter but also for its possible impact on Internet copyright law. The issue of copyrighted material on the Web has assumed greater priority as videos, music and other proprietary material has flooded onto the Internet.
[snip]
In the closely watched Perfect 10 case, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit in San Francisco reversed the decision of a lower-court judge, who had blocked Google from showing the small images. The appeals court ruled that the thumbnails fell within a "fair use" exception in copyright law because they play a role in the search process and thus have a function different from that of the original photos.
"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," Judge Sandra S. Ikuta wrote for the panel.
Perfect 10's case won support from the motion picture and recording industries, which have often complained that their copyrights are violated by Internet companies. Some groups advocating greater openness on the Web have lined up behind Google.
"We think this is a tremendous decision for the principle of fair use," said Art Brodsky, a spokesman for the Public Knowledge advocacy group.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Obviously the adult company was pretty inept at webpages. Robots.txt would have stopped any company from legally getting their images. The old saying “Ignorance of the law is no excuse”, holds doubley so here.
All your boobs are belong to us !!!
What you say!!
A good decision for anyone who wants to see tiny nudes.
This Thread Is Worthless Without Thumbnails.
I bet this thread gets alot of views!!!
Thumbnails of naked chicks, as requested.
It’s the only reason I came in here..
For great justice!
L0L
Thumbnails! (at least some of them)
Where’s the pictures?
It says that it's a magazine for connoisseurs. I think that means eating corn fed bison and then wearing the hides as buffalo robes.
What is the internet for?
Nice thread, mathprof. I’m filing it under “liddle nekkid pitchers”...
I'm not aware of any statutes or case law involving Robots.txt. I believe it is a convention that does not have any legal significance.
Search engines check for the file robots.txt on your webpage, robots.txt is described below,Note: Search engines are called Robots in the web industry.
The Robots Exclusion Protocol
The Robots Exclusion Protocol is a method that allows Web site administrators to indicate to visiting robots which parts of their site should not be visited by the robot.
In a nutshell, when a Robot vists a Web site, say http://www.foobar.com/, it firsts checks for http://www.foobar.com/robots.txt. If it can find this document, it will analyse its contents for records like:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
to see if it is allowed to retrieve the document. The precise details on how these rules can be specified, and what they mean, can be found in: Robotstxt.org
The Robots protocol can also be found at google's site here, Google's webmaster site
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