WebProNews

"In spite of the huge benefit search engines like Google provide", US District Court Judge, A Howard Matz has ruled that that images drawn from a pornographic, membership based site Perfect10, might violate US copyright laws.

Matz ruled that Google's inclusion of thumbnail images drawn from the Perfect10 site might not fall within the boundaries of the "fair use" exemption that allows copyright images to be used in areas such as news stories, art criticism and education.

The case has much larger implications for a variety of image based search appliances including the image search functions of Yahoo, MSN, A9 and Ask. Most, if not all contain copyrighted images. It could also affect the development of social networking applications such as Flickr and Picasa along with other image sharing services on multiple devices.

Matz is going to deliver a preliminary injunction against Google's image service, ordering Google and Perfect10 to supply information to help him properly phrase the ruling by March 8. Google has said it will likely appeal it.

Jim Hedger is the SEO Manager of StepForth Search Engine Placement Inc. Based in Victoria, BC, Canada, StepForth is the result of the consolidation of BraveArt Website Management, Promotion Experts, and Phoenix Creative Works, and has provided professional search engine placement and management services since 1997. http://www.stepforth.com/ Tel - 250-385-1190 Toll Free - 877-385-5526 Fax - 250-385-1198