Free peeks at nude models
p2pnet.net News:- The adult entertainment company Perfect 10 has sued Google for copyright infringement, saying it’s providing free peeks at nude models that Perfect 10’s Web sites charges good money to see.
The complaint says Google is offering unauthorized access to its copyright pictures, for which it charges $25.50 per month for peeks.
Perfect 10 says many of the images come from other unauthorized Web sites located in foreign countries, some of whom hack its site to get the images.
Dutch playboy attacks websites
A widely popular Dutch soap actress posed nude in the Christmas issue of Playboy, no revelation there. But after breast implants accusations and her contract with Playboy were leaked to a Dutch news paper, the number one query on Dutch search engines was “Georgina Verbaan”.
The contract revealed she receives as much as 0,55 eurocents per pageview and additional compensation for downloaded cellphone wallpapers. Playboy charges as much as 3 euro per peek.
Obviously, those images surfaced online, sites offered deeplinks into Playboy’s site and file trading was heavy. Not surprisingly Playboy publisher Sanoma fired off a series of Cease & Desist notices.
Where do we stand?
In the first significant case -Ticketmaster v. Tickets.com in 2000 – deeplinks were allowed by the courts (Note: Ticketmaster v. Microsoft in 1999 settled out of court).
Second, Kelly v. Arriba Soft Corporation in 2002 stated that although showing thumbnails was fair-use, full sized images could be an infringement. In addition, the DMCA was already enforce and fortunately dismissed in the Arriba case.
Keep in mind, the above cases involved paid services and have been echoed in other courts around the world.
Do Playboy and Perfect 10 have a case?
Google obtains large numbers of images from numerous sources using a spider, without seeking authorization. While the thumbnail use is commercial, it’s also of a somewhat more incidental and less exploitative nature than more traditional types of “commercial use”.
Basically, search-engines have immunity – but try and explain that to Perfect 10.
Playboy ordered some twenty websites to take down links and about fifteen obeyed. What’s unclear is – did they contact hosting providers, or the websites direct? And that’s important because a recent Dutch study showed eight out of 10 host providers comply with C&D notice without any review of the claim whatsoever.
Although some sites offered full-sized images and weren’t search engines, some simply offered deeplinks to the Playboy site.
The last big hyperlink court case in the EU “Paperboy” reaffirmed the Ticketmaster v. Tickets.com ruling: deeplinks are not an infringement of copyrights. The Dutch courts share this view, see the Kranten.com case.
As more hybrid links like ed2k and Bittorrent links surface and courts keep coughing up vague rulings, confusion will linger.
Raymond Blijd – fk2w
December 1st, 2004 at 2:39 pm
$25 a month ???? for porn??? get it for free on p2p (maybe appeals to aol and mac users)
December 5th, 2004 at 5:32 am
December 23rd, 2004 at 9:23 am
Hi
Keen to ‘peek’