This
case shows up the growing discrepancy between changes in technology and
the legal system, in particular over copyright and what constitutes
fair use.
Perfect 10 (P10) launched its legal complaint against Google back in
November 2004, alleging that Google users could find its photos of nude
women free of charge by providing links to websites that contain
pirated copies of its images.
Perfect 10 publishes a magazine that sells for $7.99 and has a
subscription-based website that costs $25.50 per month so the company
was potentially losing money due to this.
US District Court Judge A. Howard Matz concluded, "Google creation and
public display of thumbnails likely do directly infringe P10's
copyrights".
"The court reaches this conclusion despite the enormous public benefit
that search engines such as Google provide," said the judge in a
lengthy court order filed on Friday, and he added that the
Google-created thumbnails could undermine Perfect 10's efforts to sell
small images to mobile phone users.
However, judge Matz said Google did not gain financially from the
thumbnails and the websites hosting the pirated images were in the
wrong, so a damages claim against Google was unlikely to go ahead.
The judge issued a temporary injunction against Google and gave both sides until 8 March to settle their problems.
