Search Engine Sued Over Copyright

jesser writes, "The L.A. Times reports that a Web site operator is suing image search engine Ditto over copyright infringement. A lower court has already found Ditto to be exercising 'fair use' legally. One wonders why the Web site operator isn't happy that people can actually find his Web site, and also why he didn't submit his page to an image search with more money behind it ... and then sue it instead of Ditto." Here's the courtopinion - don't know how much longer that URL will be valid.

Re:Protection from search engines

[penguinicide]

Or he could try robots.txt.

He should exhaust technological solutions before resorting to legal ones.

More important: Free Use upheld

[rgmoore]

More important than that the suit is taking place is that the lower court has already ruled that storing and displaying part of an indexed site constituted protected fair use. Others on slashdot have pointed out that this is a potentially contentious issue. Some sites, like Google [google.com] actually keep a copy of each page as it existed when they referenced it. The lower court ruling protects that practices as fair use copying. The LA Times article suggests that the ruling is likely to be upheld- a big win for free speech on the net.

Protection from search engines

[Markar]

Seems to me if someone didn't want search engines to access their photographs and written works they wouldn't put them on the site, merely a reference on the web page. They could encrypt the photos, written works, etc and only give keys to registered guests. Or they could do what some musicians on MP3.com do, put examples on the site for free download to review to generate interest in purchasing the complete work. They should be intelligent enough to understand that works on websites will be copied whether they approve or not. Give me a break, if you don't want it copied, don't put it on a website!

Search engines and caching

[DaveHowe]

Hmm. I had a quick look, but it DOES seem that the engine keeps a cached copy of each image (as a thumbnail?) on the server media.ditto.com.
I can see both plusses and minuses for this approach; the big plusses are obviously:

1. Servers don't get /.tted every time they appear on a search result for something totally different (for example, a search for tigers looking for big stripy animals, turning up a tiger woods fansite)
2. You don't end up with a pageful of "broken link" images
3. Websites can't pull a bait-and-switch - swapping out a pre-indexed image for something different (like porn or advertising)

to be honest though, as long as the search engines *are* just search engines, he should be glad of the free publicity and stop trying to make an extra buck on top....
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Did you notice...

[tedbronson]

On the bottom of the Court link, there were TWO files you could download of the case... One of them, of course, HAD to be a PDF file, but the other was a... a... WORD PERFECT 6.1 FILE! At least the government has enough sense not to use Microsoft products!

about time

[bluGill]

A (vague) friend of mine wrote a program he called image spider (for OS/2 I belive) , which did essentially the same thing. He got a threatening letter from some website, and lacking the money to fight the battle he ended up shutting down.

Re:Protection from search engines

[dillon_rinker]

Yup. I was thinking the other day that placing ANYTHING into a directory that was accessible by EVERYBODY and granting EVERYBODY permission to read it constituted implicit permission to make copies.