Perfect 10 has issued a press release announcing it is now going after Microsoft for copyright infringement over including Perfect 10′s images in Live Image Search.
Norm Zada, Perfect 10′s president said:
Microsoft is showing tens of thousands of extremely valuable celebrity images, along with Perfect 10 images, without authorization, which it obtains from hundreds if not thousands of pirate websites.
Perfect 10 sound familiar to you? It should. They sued Google in 2005 for the same thing. In fact, Perfect 10 won an injunction against Google in February 2006. However, the decision was reversed in May of this year.
We conclude that Perfect 10 is unlikely to be able to overcome Google’s fair use defense and, accordingly, we vacate the preliminary injunction regarding Google’s use of thumbnail images.
Related Topics: Legal: Copyright | Microsoft: Bing
Do they not know about implementing noindex / nofollow tags along with a robots.txt file to keep the engines out?
What, no screencaps of sample searches? ;)
@tzd123
I think they’re more concerned about the fact that the SEs are linking to images from sites that have pirated Perfect 10′s content. How exactly the SEs are supposed to be able to police that is beyond me. Using the DMCA takedown notice approach like you get on YouTube could lead to mass deletions of competitors content.
I do agree with their knock on filtering though. I’ve got the image search set to safe search on my home PCs, but when I was doing a search the other day for my daughter I had to quickly back out when a nude image came up among the results.