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Ned Potter is the science correspondent for ABC's "World News with Charles Gibson." He has reported on such topics as space exploration, the human genome and climate change.
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Sex and Google
May 16, 2007 6:39 PM
The Internet is described, time and again, as a "disruptive" technology--one that changes the way business is done, the way people learn things, the way they get information, they way they view the world, the way they satisfy their most secret cravings.
Witness today's decision by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, ruling in favor of Google and the small thumbnail pictures you get when you're looking for a full-sized picture.
An adult publisher, Perfect 10, Inc., was suing them (and Amazon.com as well), complaining Google's image search system violated their copyright. Go to Google, click on "images," search for a picture you're after, and--whether it's naked women or d'Alembert's Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot you seek--you'll get a series of thumbnail pictures.
Let's just say those thumbnails ate into Perfect 10's business. If, for free, Google could find one of their pictures in a resolution good enough for the screen of your cell phone, you wouldn't pay money to go to Perfect 10's site for the same thing.
Google may make a little money if your search generates ads to appear on the page margins. Perfect 10 was losing out.
A District Court had ruled in Perfect 10's favor. But Judge Sandra S. Ikuta, writing for the Appeals Court, found in Google's favor. (The opinion is HERE.)
"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," she wrote.
The Appeals Court did uphold the right of a fee-charging website--erotic or otherwise--to protect against freeloaders getting in the back door Google potentially offered. It sent the case back to the lower court. But as for those little thumbnails...no, said Judge Ikuta, Google is just showing you where to find the real thing. The thumbnails are "transformative" because they're not the same as the full-resolution pictures you were presumably after.
Please feel free, as always, to weigh in. The decision is not light reading; one theme that comes from it is that we're all still feeling our way along, trying to figure out how new technologies--a search engine, a cell phone--fit in with our existing laws and mores.
By the way, I went into Google images and searched for..."Google." Try it yourself--you'll get pages of thumbnails, but none of the first hundred I found were from Google itself.
May 16, 2007 | Permalink | Share | User Comments (4)
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I think you highlighted the true essence of this case by "following the money": Perfect 10 brought its suit because it believed that Google and Amazon's A9 search engine were allowing viewing of its copyrighted photos for free, depriving it of income. Judge Ikuta's ruling was, in my opinion, well-reasoned and supported by the fact that a search engine is designed to provide results showing where on the internet one can go to find the information wanted, not to serve as a short-cut to circumvent the websites which contain that information. But these are just my thoughts on the matter, since I've been too busy reading "d'Alembert's Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia of Diderot" with all of its racy pictures to keep up on current events.
Posted by: chuck | May 17, 2007 8:35:16 AM
Being an intellectual lightweight, I'm not prepared to get into a discussion of the legalities or illegalities of the situation. I do, however, appreciate all (and I mean all) of what the internet has to offer to anyone and everyone. Whether for good or ill, I think that the Library of Alexandria has been revived and is better than ever.
Any knowledge that is out there is now available to everyone. How it's used and how it's taken advantage of is a cultural thing. Maybe that fact alone can point us to bettering ourselves as a civilization. Maybe if we see our dirty laundry flapping in the breeze we'll do something about it.
Posted by: Andy | May 17, 2007 10:23:27 AM
It's fascinating how technology changes law and our very concepts of our world. Before printing became commonplace, and even for quite a while after, there was no such thing as "copyright," nor even a clear concept of how a piece of work could belong to its creator.
Now we're questioning whether a computer-interpreted phone line or satellite link that displays a lower pixel version of an electronic image that's computer code interpreted by a personal computer and electronically put together on a visual monitor is a copyright offense. Weird.
Posted by: Alden Loveshade | May 17, 2007 12:27:49 PM
I don't view the internet as a "disruptive" technology. I have been using it for 11 years, and it gets better all the time. There really is nothing like having the worlds largest encyclopedia at your finger tips. I know that some people use the internet for harm, but isn't that how everything can be? If this is what "disruptive" technology looks like, well, keep it coming.
Posted by: Kerri | May 18, 2007 3:47:28 PM
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