Photo publisher Perfect 10 "says it's plagued by copyright pirates who pay its $25.50 monthly fee and then reproduce its copyright images on sites that are indexed by Google and incorporated in its image search feature," reports CNet. It therefore sued Google, and has got a (preliminary) result:
US District Judge A. Howard Matz ruled Friday that Perfect 10, an adult-oriented Web site featuring "beautiful natural women" in the nude, has shown that Google image search probably infringes copyright law "by creating and displaying thumbnail copies of its photographs."
The Los Angeles judge said he would award Perfect 10 a preliminary injunction against Google, and gave lawyers for both sides until March 8 to propose the injunction's wording.
The interesting bit is that you can use a phone to access Google Mobile's image search and save the thumbnails:
Those scaled-down images are similar to what Perfect 10 offers as a subscription service through U.K.-based Fonestarz and could, the court ruled, harm the market for Perfect 10's subscription-based image sales.
"Google's thumbnail images are essentially the same size and of the same quality as the reduced-size images that (Perfect 10) licenses to Fonestarz," Matz wrote.
CNet's story also has a link to a friend-of-the-court brief (PDF) filed by The Electronic Frontier Foundation supporting Google. There's an EFF press release here.
