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It's once again easy to consume porn online after a US court ruled in favor of search juggernaut Google's right to display tiny pictures of naked people.

A San Francisco appeals court has reversed a lower court's preliminary injunction that barred Google from displaying thumbnail-size pornographic images from the Perfect 10 site. Google might, though, be liable for allowing links to sites that display pirated copies of the images.

The lower court had found Google guilty of violating Perfect 10's copyright on images, but said it was probably not responsible for displays of the underlying images from the porn merchant's site.

Importantly for search engines everywhere, Judge Sandra Ikuta ruled Perfect 10 was unlikely to be able to overcome Google's "fair use" defense in use of the images. A loss could have opened the door to other, similar cases against Google and fellow search engines.

Perfect 10, a magazine and web publisher, objected to Google returning thumbnails of its images of nude women without its permission in 2001. Perfect 10 typically charges, er, clients a monthly fee for access to its site. Perfect 10 has filed similar claims against Amazon.com and its A9.com operation. ®

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Latest Comments

ok, well, yeah

"The case has nothing to do with robots.txt."

The article seems to suggest otherwise.

Another thought, if I may.

Porn sites in the US are now required to keep a record / proof of the models they publish pics / vids of. Secondary producers (eg. affiliates) are also required to hold this info (I think).

Shouldn't Google to the same then for each XXX pic is displays?

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Anonymous Coward

Facts, get them before commenting

The case has nothing to do with robots.txt. Perfect 10 sued because all the pictures on google that are on the image search are pirated images. I am sure perfect 10 wouldn't mind google sending traffic its way, however, all the traffic google would create goes to some sites that stole the pictures and are giving the pictures away for free. And I am sure they sent notices, and never removed them.

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Trickery will get you nowhere

"server trickery allows for a certain level of control"

A server can return something different when it detects it is googlebot that is making the request. But google occasionally checks anonymously to ensure that the server is returning the same content to googlebot as it returns to ordinary browsers -- and at that time, google will rightly demote the site for misrepresentation.

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