Ruling may have sweeping implications for search engines.
Published:
21 December 1999 y., Tuesday
In a case that may have sweeping implications for search engines of all kinds, a federal judge in California has ruled that a "visual search engine" did not violate copyright laws by collecting thumbnail images of photographs from the Web and displaying them on its site. The necessity of searching the Internet outweighed any other factor in determining whether a copyright was violated, the judge said.
In January, a California photographer sued Ditto.com, then known as the Arriba Vista Image Searcher, for violating her copyright by collecting and displaying 35 of her copyrighted images on its site as search results. The Ditto search engine works by "spidering" the Web - having a computer program collect some two million images from any site on the Internet it can find them - then shrinking each image down to a thumbnail image that is displayed in the search result.
The photographer argued that an image is an image and displaying her copyrighted photographs without her permission - and making money in the process - was effectively stealing.
The U.S. District Court judge in Santa Ana, Calif. ruled that Ditto wasn_t stealing the images. But the 15-page decision, handed down late Thursday, was somewhat more complicated - with the judge effectively giving a split decision on many of the relevant issues. However the judge said that the crucial role search engines serve for users of the Internet outweighs the other factors and makes Ditto_s thumbnails "fair use" of the images.
Copying, publishing, announcing any information from the News.lt portal without written permission of News.lt editorial office is prohibited.
The most popular articles
Software company announced new structure_ of it_s business.
more »
search.lt presents newest links
more »
Not ruled out, not ruled in
more »
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), meeting in Carthage, Tunisia this week, will be getting down to brass tacks on how the Internet works for the first time
more »
search.lt presents newest links
more »
Romania emerges as new world nexus of cybercrime
more »
A consortium of Alaskan law enforcement agencies today announced a new information sharing initiative that uses the commercially-available Coplink system to analyze disparate pieces of data for investigative leads
more »
A group of students at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania has launched an "electronic civil disobedience" campaign
more »
Microsoft Corp. has a variety of "opportunities" to take cost out of the development, deployment and day-to-day operations of IT systems
more »
There's a "total meltdown" in America's intelligence services
more »
Project Green aims to bring enterprise applications, including Great Plains and Navision, into a single unified .Net architecture
more »