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.
Is this fair?
Fairness has nothing to do with it. Google Search indexes text; Google Images indexes images. Different media, different search algorithms.
Bah. But I will block the image crawler stuff in my robots.txt.
Since you've known that Google Images is a source of low-quality, why have you waited until now?
Again, it's a narrow ruling about a very specific issue, and it has nothing to do with "political fallout," search engines in general, or the Google/Yahoo/MSN cache.
Google: precedent.
Snippets are next.
Google: precedent.
A precedent for what? The ruling was quite narrow.
Snippets are next.
Unlikely. Snippets are clearly "fair use."
Snippets are clearly "fair use."
Fair use is by and large a US concept. No other country grants such extensive use of unlicensed material.
It would be difficult for any image producing website to get a similar judgement -- unless they had the same circumstances as Perfect 10.
Sorry, it's neither happy news for the GoogleHaters or sad news for the GoogleLovers. ;)
read message 22
others stole Perfect 10's pictures...and Google had copies of the stolen stuff. no matter what Perfect 10 does to their robots.txt they can't really stop Google from caching pirated versions of their work off other sites.
'Intellectual property' is a contradictio in adjecto.
Time will come when everyone will have the right to copy and distribute everything he wants; let the receiver decide about whether he wants that stuff, and let the producer deserve the honour. For instance, look at/listen to the arctic monkeys. In a few decades the music industry won't exist any more, because we don't need it any more, because our kids will distribute their garage-music via websites, ICQ and its antedecessors.
The question is: How can people like carlr (msg28) and all the poor poet's on his planet make their living until we have understood this, until we have reorganized our post-in-dust-realized societies in such a manner that our creative human potentials can really flourish?
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.
It can take up to 2 months for Google to quit picking up images after you set it up in robots.txt.
Who uses Google images? Probably 99% webmasters and graphic designers looking for ideas.
I think this is a good thing. Let Google set up a submit form on Google images if people want their images displayed.
Unlikely. Snippets are clearly "fair use."
Simply untrue; that is far too broad. Fair use is intentionally vague. There is no magic number of words that you can take and claim fair use.
To get on the other side of this mostly one sided discussion: Good for Perfect10.
Google image search is often used explicitly for the purpose of violating copyrights, and they make it far too easy to do so. It would be easy enough for them to implement a far more legal (and useful!) image search, and maybe this will light some fires.
I think this is a good thing. Let Google set up a submit form on Google images if people want their images displayed.
Amen. Google video is working wonders for many people. It gives Google a high quality, easily indexable content, and respects people's rights. I would certainly be one of the first to sign up.
[edited by: ncreegan at 9:37 pm (utc) on Feb. 22, 2006]
First
How do I block all the scrapers site like Google who does not bring me traffic?
I can block googlebot.
But what about googlebot-image, google-i-want-to-know-everything, google-mini, google-fake-ip-bot, etc.
How do I tell them don't eat my bandwitdh?
How do I tell them not to cache non-html files?
How do I tell them only request X no. files/day?
Second
Even if I let google index my images, what right does google have to show my image in there frame with there ads/logos, stealing my bandwidth?
Unlikely. Snippets are clearly "fair use."
Simply untrue; that is far too broad. Fair use is intentionally vague. There is no magic number of words that you can take and claim fair use.
To be overly legalistic yes, but without snippets it would be virtually impossible for search engines to function at all.
My point was just that it isn't crystal clear -- like the image search. I'm not about to say they can't take a clip of my content.
That said, I don't necessarily agree with you -- I think hand written page descriptions (or... meta descriptions!?) would be much more valuable than many snippets.
Joe's wonder... absolutely vibrant red widget... producing high... attitude and... very macho... turkey basting tools!
[somedomain.com...] - 11k - Feb 25th 2006
Google's opt out system makes more sense than an opt in because by default, it treats all the same and its mission is to organize the world's information. From that perspective, all information becomes fair use.
Now traditionally, copyrights have given licenses to creators for a fix amount of time. As the time passes by, the US Government has given to pressure from big companies who want to extend copyrights protections over a longer preriod, thus not longer playing fair game with the rest of society.
The initial sense of the copyright laws was that contents would revert to public use after a period of time - because it is generally in the best interest of society.
In a sense, search engines promote the initial concept of the law. As for the plaintiff in this case, the real copyright - what they call the moral copyrights - belong to the photographer that has taken the pictures - not the firm that paid for them.
I wonder if in 50 years after the death of the photographers that took the pictures, if Perfect 10 will gladly give away its vintage porn contents to the Web as the American laws was designed for.
regardless of this, the fact that p10 owns the copyright is not even debated, and if you read the judge's order you'll see even Google acknowledges this.
Seems a bit ridiculous to me.
If you don't want to be spidered, stay off the net and advertise your porn pictures in magazines.
I have less trouble with the argument that if Google is going to profit from copyright infringement by permitting content scrapers, plagiarists, and image thieves to profit from AdSense ads, they should at least be able to demonstrate a good faith effort to terminate those publisher accounts if they wish to argue that they aren't profiting from the traffic their images database directs to those sites. While I understand that Google probably doesn't want to get in the position of having courts try to determine how much effort is "enough", it is also no secret that there are many content thieves who (at least by their own account) are making huge AdSense profits.
In the example you give, CNN owns the news feed generated by the cameraman. But the cameraman has something called moral copyrights which can not be removed - or sold. They remain with the contents' generator forever. I was making a point that companies who are concerned about their commercial copyrights, are often not the one who really generated the contents in the first place...
Yes, I think Google could do a lot of good if that's what they were interested in doing... but what all this ammounts to is Google finding yet another way to sell more ads. I don't think the internet will be so great if Google manages to monopolize it. It is a slippery slope and I agree that the ability to crawl websites does benefit the greater good generally, but there must be limits to what Google is allowed to do in the name of fairness and competition. The company is getting quite powerful and could become far more of a manace than MS ever could be.
Is Google search useful, brilliant, revolutionary? Absolutely. Is it a license to do whatever they want with other people's content? Absolutely not. It's a double standard, try to infringe on Google's copyright and see what sort of a reaction you get from them.
Google's entire business model makes them the world's largest parasite. Let's hope they do more with that money that just try to control the world's acess to information so they can sell more ads.
Maybe Google should display a 'Terms and Conditions' to everyone who lists their site, stating the fact that parts of their website may be reproduced in an effort to provide a better service.
Just a thought.
Chris.
A precedent for what? The ruling was quite narrow.
A precedent for snippets being next to go.
Unlikely. Snippets are clearly "fair use."
Under which aspect of fair use under the law?
This is not a "snippet-killer" or "cache-killer" precedent setting decision. It's a weird mix of intersecting issues that caused the judge to rule for Perfect 10.
No. I'm saying that there will be a lawsuit over snippets next because snippets, like thumbnails, affect the value of the text from which they are taken.
To be overly legalistic yes, but without snippets it would be virtually impossible for search engines to function at all.
Huh? If I search for "widgets" I can't get a list of websites about widgets without the snippets also being presented?
I'm certain that you're just making this misguided argument to be mischievous.
It would also be dependant upon a clear ruling that the page TITLE tag is not protected by copyright. If snippets were really ever ruled to be a violation of copyright, then this wouldn't exactly be a slam dunk. The only pieces of information you could use with any certainty would be the site name and the URL.
