Google loses copyright case against Perfect 10

Search engine giants Google have lost a case lodged by ‘natural model’ site Perfect 10. Perfect 10 had sued Google earlier claiming that the website was storing their copyrighted images and letting users access to the images hosted on third party sites, which are otherwise copyrighted with them.

A judge in California has ruled the judgment in favor of Perfect 10 and said that Google infringed Perfect 10’s copyright on the pictures by taking copies and storing them on its own servers.

Perfect 10 had also claimed that Google was causing financial losses to the company by letting the web users access otherwise restricted images through their image search engine. The company publishes a magazine that sells for $7.99 per issue and also enables the user to access images by paying a subscription fee to access these images online.

However, Google also find some relief from the judgment, which also included the fact that they were perfectly within the law to link to the original version of the pictures. Storing caches of images on their servers however has been declared an offense. Google might face more problems in the future if other companies use this lawsuit as the base for their lawsuits.

Perfect 10 on their part have already sued Amazon for similar reasons related to image searches on their A9 search engine, which licenses Google Search Engine technology. In our opinion, Google should respond by totally blocking Perfect 10 websites and their content from their various search engines. The company should also make it easier for web publishers to get their content off their servers if they so desire.

A recent story online highlighted the fact that if you use Google’s Blogger service to host your images, they are not removable from the Google’s servers even if you decide not to use them on your blogs. This is overall a very bad deal for the end user. TechWhack recommend the users to use other services like Flickr where they have more control over their image hosting facilities.