Perfect 10 has basically made a business out of suing companies claiming copyright abuse. The former publisher of "adult" magazines has gone on a rampage suing tons of companies -- including all the major search engines -- claiming that pointing people to infringing results and showing thumbnails of copyrighted images is infringement itself. For an eye-opening look at Perfect 10, the best read is probably Rapidshare's countersuit from a few years ago, that goes into detail on how the company operates. So far, Perfect 10 has lost almost all of its big cases -- including those against both payment processors and search engines. To be honest, in the long run, Perfect 10 may have done a lot of good in presenting cases that highlight the clear insanity of certain interpretations of copyright law, providing strong and clear precedents from court rulings that have been tremendously useful in other cases.

The lawsuit against Google for showing thumbnails has bounced around for years, with the appeals court saying that showing those thumbnails is fair use -- something those freaking out about Pinterest might want to keep in mind. As it's done before, the Supreme Court has (once again) rejected one of Perfect 10's appeals, meaning that the (strong) lower court ruling stands. Yes, technically, it only applies in the 9th Circuit, but this ruling seems to be one that other courts are willing to cite and use, so hopefully the precedent is considered more widespread. While it would have been nice to have a Supreme Court ruling smacking down Perfect 10 and making such a clear fair use ruling apply across the board, for now we'll be happy with just keeping the good 9th Circuit ruling in place.

Over in Germany, a court has ruled that Google does not infringe on the copyright for images when it displays thumbnails of those images in its image search. This is, obviously, quite a good ruling. If it had gone the other way, it would have effectively killed Google's image search. While there are some similarities to the court rulings against Perfect 10 (who has sued various search engines for displaying thumbnails) in the US, there is one major difference. With Perfect 10, the complaints were mainly about search engines indexing images copied/scanned by others. In this German case, the artist was upset that Google showed images that she, herself, put on the website. It seems that this particular point made a strong impression on the judge, who noted that "The plaintiff made the content of her site available without using technical tools to block search engines from finding and displaying her works," and because of that, Google "was allowed to interpret the plaintiff's behavior as agreeing to use her works in image searches." Always nice to see a reasonable ruling.

Porn magazine publisher Perfect 10 has spent tons of money on a long series of fruitless lawsuits against the operators of search engines. The issue is that people with access to Perfect 10 photos had put them online, and (of course) search engines indexed these and included them in their image search features. Perfect 10 insisted that, since these search engines showed thumbnails of the images, the search engines were liable for the infringement. Except that courts keep throwing these cases out. But, that hasn't stopped Perfect 10. However, all it has to show for it is another loss. In its lawsuit against Amazon, for Amazon's A9 search subsidiary, the court has tossed out the lawsuit, pointing out that the DMCA safe harbors clearly protect Amazon, while also highlighting a bunch of pretty basic mistakes that Perfect 10 made in filing the lawsuit (you would think, having filed so many similar lawsuits, that it would get the specifics right). At some point, the company needs to realize that these lawsuits aren't getting it very far.

As a bit of a non-Christmas gift, it appears that a patent holder, using the infamous Niro Scavone law firm (to whom the name "Patent Troll" was first applied) has sued Google, Apple and Microsoft over a patent that the patent holder appears to believe covers any sort of thumbnail image that shows some of the actual file. You can read the full patent for a system and method for iconic software environment management and then ponder what is allowed to pass as a legitimate patent these days. The patent was first filed in 2001, but the priority date appears to be 1998. Either way, you'd be hard pressed to find anything in the patent that wouldn't have been considered a natural progression in 1998 (or well before that). Nothing like ending the year with yet another ridiculous patent lawsuit.

US courts have recognized, reasonably, that an image search engine like Google's is not infringing on copyrights when it displays thumbnail images as a result of a search. However, it appears that German courts are not quite so understanding. Two new rulings in Germany say that thumbnail images are, in fact, copyright infringement. The German court's reasoning was: "It doesn't matter that thumbnails are much smaller than original pictures and are displayed in a lower resolution. By using photos in thumbnails, no new work is created." While I'm certainly not as familiar with German copyright law as I am with American copyright law, this statement still doesn't make that much sense.

The purpose of copyright law shouldn't just be concerned with whether or not a new work is created, but the purpose of what's being done. So it's difficult to see, for example, how a thumbnail that links to the original can possibly do any harm. If the "artist" behind an image doesn't want it found in Google, don't put it online. If the complaint is that someone else put the image on Google allowing it to be indexed, that's not Google's fault, but whoever put it online. Suing Google makes little sense -- and a judge finding against Google makes even less sense. Google has made it clear it intends to appeal, but it's troubling that a court would rule this way in the first place. It suggests, at the very least, a less than complete understanding of how an image search engine works. It also should raise questions about whether or not this ruling effectively makes any sort of inline hotlinking of images copyright violations as well.

Three years ago, porn magazine publisher Perfect 10 sued Google for copyright infringement. The case was a strange one. Google's image search was showing thumbnails of Perfect 10's images, but courts have ruled that thumbnails are fair use in search engines. The real complaint from Perfect 10 was that other sites were taking the images from their magazines and putting them online -- and that Google was helping people find them. In other words, the real copyright infringement was being done by others, but Perfect 10 was suing Google because Google has a lot more money and was an easier target. After some back and forth in the courts, an appeals court finally ruled in favor of Google. Oddly, despite this loss, Perfect 10 has gone out and sued Microsoft for the exact same thing. Once again, it's suing the wrong party -- and even admits it, saying that "it's absolutely hopeless" to find those actually responsible for the infringement, so it's suing Microsoft instead. That's like saying it's absolutely hopeless to find the bank robbers, so we're going to sue Ford for making their getaway car. Perfect 10 also complains that its business is being destroyed -- which is probably true. However, that's the result of a bad business model and not being able to adjust to the changing market. It may suck for Perfect 10 that it doesn't know how to run a modern business, but it's not against the law.