The popularity of cellphones, iPods, and other small-screened devices resulted in a ruling unfavorable to Google in a case against it by the website Perfect10.com.That Google's image search function displayed thumbnail photos from Perfect 10 was found by U.S. District Court Judge Howard Matz to impede Perfect 10 from capitalizing on thumbnail-size downloads of its "most beautiful natural women in the world".
In other words, Google is providing for free what Perfect 10 seeks to make money from.
I find this fascinating in a Marshall McLuhan kind of way. There wouldn't be a lawsuit if the medium didn't exist for the viewing of tiny images, and that medium didn't exist a few years ago.
"Thumbnail images" used to be synonymous with "Impossible to be used for prurient interests" but now that people are willing to buy thumbnail-sized content for their tinier and tinier screens, that argument is out the window.
It's like flipping to a channel you haven't paid for and watching the scrambled footage. To most people, those images are useless. Imagine a subscription-based device then being created for non-stop viewing of scrambled footage, thus making everything picked up (and discarded) by accident a copyright infringement.
Google lawyer Michael Kwun predicts that the injunction the two companies are now supposed to hammer out will only affect image searches related to Perfect 10, and that the court ruling will not have any effect on the other thumbnail results from paysites.
Previously: Google won't lie down
See also: Google infringed copyright by posting thumbnail porn photos; Perfect 10
posted by Gram the Man
at
Wednesday, February 22, 2006 
Post a Comment Links to this post:
Create a Link << Home