Forum Moderators: goodroi
Internet giant Google infringed copyright rules by posting thumbnail-size photos from other websites on its search-results pages, a US judge said in a ruling issued yesterday.
Sheesh.
Because it would be a lot easier to hire lawyers to sue Google for an injunction, than to add them to your robots.txt.
That's not the issue. They've been doing this by default, without permission. The popular analogy is something like, if I don't put a lock on my door, do you have the right to come in and take my stuff?
Turbo
What's next, google has to ask for permission in writing before crawling your website?
Alexa (an Amazon company) does exactly the same ...
Turbo
The copyright case with Google has to do with the Google image search results which display thumbnails of images from a website.
(I'm not saying Alexa is any more right or wrong, I'm just pointing out the distinction)
That's not the issue. They've been doing this by default, without permission. The popular analogy is something like, if I don't put a lock on my door, do you have the right to come in and take my stuff?
That's a bad analogy, because 99.9999999999% of us wants google to crawl our website, and crawl it deep.
It would have been easier for Perfect10 to hire a webmaster instead of a lawyer.
If Google Images are discontinued, because of some stupid idiot running a smut site, can't learn to use a robot exclude file, Im going to be pis*ed.
I hope that google ads perfect10 to their banned Website list. Let see how much revenue they loose then :)
What's next, google has to ask for permission in writing before crawling your website?
I hope so. Then maybe search engines will be calling us to list our websites becuase we have not included them in our robots.txt. Cnet could protest for example if their digital camera reviews were no where to be found on the first 5 pages by excluding certain search engines. It would give all the large quality content providers some needed leverage.
Then perhaps we will have a way to communicate with the SE's and discuss why our websites are penalized, why they reward so many spammy websites, etc. I'm sick and tired of not being able to communicate with the SE's. If they had to get our permission to list our websites I think it would be a huge victory for both the online webmaster and the search engine user as far as quality.
What's next, google has to ask for permission in writing before crawling your website?
[edited by: inuwolf at 4:24 pm (utc) on Feb. 22, 2006]
The popular analogy is something like, if I don't put a lock on my door, do you have the right to come in and take my stuff?
Not really, because noone has the right to enter someone else's apartment, lock or no lock. Google did have the right to use sites thumbnails, even without permission, thanks to Fair Use, as ruled under Kelley v. Aribbasoft (ditto.com case).
1) First, it's only about images.
2) Second, it isn't about all images, but only images in a search engine (Google) that earns revenues from advertising.
3) Third, it's about the impact of Google's image-search results on the plaintiff's sales of thumbnail images.
The one part that mystified me was item #2. Google earns money from advertising, but not from advertising on image results. In fact, Google doesn't even display ads on pages of image results.
I think it's high time that Google got a reality check. I hope the Google cache gets hit next. I'm not comfortable with them using my EXACT reproduced content with their branding - and links back to THEIR content. It is copyright infringement, plain and simple.
It doesn't matter if 90% of webmasters want their images to appear in Google Image Search - it's that Google didn't even ask if they could put them there.
[edited by: NoLimits at 4:31 pm (utc) on Feb. 22, 2006]
Would love to see that happen.
They are getting free advertising and are suing the person who is providing the free advertising for them. A shot in the foot anyone?
I'm not comfortable with them using my EXACT reproduced content with their branding
You can prevent them from caching your site with a Robots noarchive meta tag.
What's next, google has to ask for permission in writing before crawling your website?
Actually I'm thinking about including a TOS on my site/robot.txt similar to googles...
"The Google Services are made available for your personal, non-commercial use only. You may not use the Google Services to sell a product or service, or to increase traffic to your Web site for commercial reasons, such as advertising sales."
Just replace Google Services with Mysitename ;)
1 G refuses to provide US government with requested information
2 Google mission statements to
Organise the worlds information and make it available but NOT TO CHINESE Populace
DO NO EVIL but only provide information that a dictatorial government believes should be available to it's people for the sake of money
Over the years governments do and will continue to encourage companies to be successfull but when those same politicians decide a company is getting to big for it's boots they have the power and the will to flex muscles and do major harm to companies
Many years ago when microsoft was an enabler of technology for the masses most governments encouraged and enabled their efforts but when Microsoft had a power beyond politics they were and continue to be reigned in as many of the fines they have been given both in North America and Europe for "shady business practices" show
I think this may well be the start of political fallout following G's decisions which if right or wrong have made political foes
steve
Agree, apparently they care more about protecting an image than making money at Perfect 10.
Google should just do them a favor and ban their entire website. Perhaps then they will be back in court suing Google to get back in. ;)
Let's not make a mountain out of a molehill, or pretend that a tempest in a teacup is Hurricane Katrina.
What's next, google has to ask for permission in writing before crawling your website?
Actually, I don't think that's next, I think that is in the past. They have chose chose to ignore this inconvenient fact.
People who always point out how simple it is to put a disallow statement in robots.txt file should remember it is just as easy to place allow statements.
I think Perfect10's point was that even if they shut down the offender, Google continues to display the thumbnail for quite a considerable period of time. But if that argument has traction it will sure open a whole can of worms.
The one part that mystified me was item #2. Google earns money from advertising, but not from advertising on image results. In fact, Google doesn't even display ads on pages of image results.
Agreed EFV. The linked article above does a poor job of describing what the judge said about Google's revenue from the thumbnailed images. From cnet [news.com.com]:
First, the search company apparently receives AdSense advertising revenue from some of the photo-pirating sites, and second, Google's image search has an option for mobile phones.
And, Amazon was also named -- not just Google.
I'm a fan of source material, so here's a link to Judge Matz's 48 page opinion (PDF) [i.i.com.com]
I doubt that was even an issue, perfect10 simply didn't want google to index the pictures without their permission, and apparently the legal obligation is on google to make sure that sites want to be indexed.
>> The one part that mystified me was item #2. Google earns money from advertising, but not from advertising on image results. In fact, Google doesn't even display ads on pages of image results.
EFV,
an argument can be made that Google still profits by attracting people to the site. Example: I offer free mp3 files on mp3.domain.com, but sell shoes on domain.com, which would be interlinked and integrated. Many people come for the free mp3 files, but a certain percentage click and see what shoes I sell
Whether or not robots.txt is a method of preventing content from being seen to search engines - the fact remains that "expressed permission" must be sought to use copyrighted material.
Now, we as internet people (including myself) love Google because they give us traffic and provide us with a stream of revenue, it's a mutual benefit to us and search engines. However, in order to come to an unbias conclusion on this topic, you need to detach yourself from that fact.
Copyrighted material is, by definition, "copyrighted" ie. the rights to copy and redistribute are restricted and protected by law. No search engine (or anyone for that matter) should assume permission to copy and/or redistribute material simply because they have not been expressly forbidden from doing so (à la robots.txt).
Moreover, robots.txt is not an integral part of web publishing, it is a non-standard method developed to help control "robots", but it is by no means a legally binding practice, thus to assume a nullified copyright on material simply through its absense or misconfiguration is of gross negligence.
All of this being in my humble opinion of course!
Crawl and list all you want....don't just serve up a copy of the information. Talk all we want about disallowing it through tags or robots.txt....but the law also protects in this area.
For a while I was having fun changing the images that were being used to amusing taunts at he poster which included ads back to my site, but the sheer volume of these precludes my continuing in this vein.
However, in the "real" SERPS, if you search for the same keyphrases, my website is almost nowhere to be seen. This is where the clients are. ANd you know what? I have to advertise with AdWords. (Adwords is 15% of my Google traffic). They dont give me free stuff... well I have 5% free Google traffic :-)
Is this fair? Bah. But I will block the image crawler stuff in my robots.txt. All image producers should do the same.
Depending on your control panel you can disable hot-linking. I believe that there is also a way to do this through other scripting, but I am not quite sure how (I know, very helpful...lol).
As far as my having the ability to put something in my robots.txt to prevent Google from stealing my content and images for their own personal gain - That would be like me saying it is okay for them to do it.
The damn tag is non-standard to boot. It's rediculous...
Just because you may make money from Google putting your images in their image search - does not mean that what they are doing is legal, and that you should defend it. Hell, I make some money off of it too - but it's still very wrong.
