February 23, 2006
Google, Pefect 10 Lawsuit a Bad Idea
Holy shit. Perfect 10, the adult website, sued Google for putting thumbnails of its images on its image search results. (”Thumbnails”, of course, are tiny, reduced-size versions of larger pictures, often witn many tiny pictures on one page.) Perfect 10 thought that these tiny images Google provided would inhibit sales of tiny images Perfect 10 would be selling for portable devices such as cell phones. Perfect 10 won! Though it is nice to see Google taken down a notch, I think this is in the wrong direction. Thumbnails should, in general, be considered fair use. Couldn’t Google block Perfect 10 images when accessed with a cell phone, PDA, blackberry browser? This is super ballsy/stupid of Perfect 10 as I could see Google, wanting to avoid future legal issues with the company, removing Perfect 10 from their site entirely. I think Perfect 10 is shooting itsself in the foot.





