AlanBarber.Org
Saturday, July 12, 2003
Fair Use Ruling
There was an interesting blurb over at SATN.org about a court ruling on fair use of copyrighted images.
A photographer sued a search engine company for copyright infringements. The companies ran a search engine for pictures on the web. The engine would go around the web looking for pictures and make thumbnails to display as results to searches on their site. The photographer requested to have his site not linked to. The company did remove him but he proceeded to file a lawsuit anyways.
The US 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the creation of thumbnails would be covered under fair use that is part of copyright law.
There's a nice 16 page ruling worth a read for the law types that do mind reading pages of lawyer speak. I'd definitely happy about how the court ruled in this case. It's nice to see the courts haven't be totally screwed up and can recognize that fair use is a part life.
In a way this helps set precedence to prove the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) is junk. Fair use has come into question thanks to the DMCA. Companies are using the DMCA as an excuse to control all use of their property. Even uses of copyright material that in the past were considered legal are being taken to court for claimed DMCA infringement.
Of course I'm not a law expert so who knows if I'm interpreting any of this stuff the way it's suppose to be
on 07/12/2003 at 03:27 PM