Just Google IT!

In the past couple of weeks there have been a couple of federal court decisions involving copyright challenges to Google’s search functions. The most important case was Perfect 10 vs. Google, where their images most likely constituted copyright infringement. Perfect 10 is an adult magazine company and operate a website. They make also make reduced-size copies of their copyrighted pictures to be downloaded onto phones. The issue was brought up against Google in two ways. When people use the Google image search engine to search for Perfect 10 models, thumbnail image’s of copyrighted photo’s show up. Also, when people clicked on that thumbnail image, a webpage with two frames appear. The upper smaller frame is hosted by Google and contains information about the picture. The lower frame shows the original web page but the image is not found there.
Perfect 10 is suing Google for copyright infringement and the display of these images through the frames. Perfect 10 says that by Google using those frames; it infringes its right to “display publicly” and “distribution” of their copyrighted images. The court found Google not guilty of copyright infringement on the lower frame because Google had not encouraged users to visit the third-party infringing websites. Google had no right or control over what was occurring on the third party websites. The court however did find Google guilty of copyright infringement on the thumbnails because they could for free be directly downloaded to cell phones which are the perfect size for cell phone screens.
The second case was between Field and Google. Blake Field is a Las Vegas lawyer who created fifty-one works and obtained copyrights for each work. When the pages containing Fields work in Google’s search results appeared, he filed a lawsuit against Google alleging direct copyright infringement. The court found that Field’s claims were not supported by the law and dismissed Field’s copyright claims. The court found that Google allows web sites to choose whether they want their site to show up on Google or not. Field was aware of this and intentionally choose not to use them.
I believe that Google will never be sued for copyright infringement because they are only providing the links for what the researcher is looking for. Google winning these past lawsuits sets historical precedence and this will help Google in the future win even more of any of these types of cases come up again. Google is just a search engine and nothing more. They help people locate sites and information that they want and lead them to the location. Google is a tool that benefits anyone who wishes to use it. It is very convenient and does not perform any copyright infringements. They are not copying anyone’s info or using it to benefit themselves. If Google were taking info from other peoples sites and claiming the info as their own then that would be copyright infringement. Google has never done this and all they are doing is just giving the seeker the site that they can find what they are looking for on. If you would like to find out more info about this case just remember: “Google it”.

Byer, David J., and Sarah T. Hogan. Intellectual Property Recent Copyright Cases Involving Google's Search Engine Clarify Digital Media Rights Online. Apr. 2006. 10 Mar. 2009 .