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Thursday, May 17, 2007

Google Inc., operator of the world's most-used Internet search engine, can display nude "thumbnail" images of photographs from adult publisher Perfect 10, a federal appeals court ruled Wednesday.

The San Francisco-based court reversed a lower court ruling that blocked Google and Amazon.com Inc. from giving Internet users access to reduced-size images on other Web sites.

U.S. District Judge Howard Matz in Los Angeles blocked Google last year from displaying the images because Perfect 10 had demonstrated a "likelihood" that Google infringed copyrights. Perfect 10 also sued Amazon.com for alleged copyright violations.

"We don't agree with the decision," Perfect 10 President Norm Zada said. "Anybody with a search box can make smaller pictures of Perfect 10 -- every picture we own -- show them to millions of people, and there's nothing we can do about it."

The appeals court sent the case back to federal district court to determine whether Google and Seattle-based Amazon.com knew they were infringing Perfect 10's copyrights and failed to take "reasonable and feasible steps to refrain from providing access" to the images, according to the ruling.

"We reverse the district court's determination that Google's thumbnail versions of Perfect 10's images likely constituted a direct infringement," read the opinion by a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Google general counsel Kent Walker said in an e-mailed statement that the decision affirmed the company's claim that it was protected by fair-use principles, which permit limited free use of copyrighted materials for uses such as reviews.

Last year, Matz rejected that argument because of the commercial benefits Google derives from the images in terms of increased traffic and advertising revenue, and because the thumbnail images are the same size and quality people can pay to download to their mobile phones.

The appeals court disagreed, "holding that Google's image search is highly transformative by creating new value for consumers," Walker said in Google's statement.

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