Google oogling Perfect 10

A US judge has decided that search outfit Google has been picking up porn from web pages to populate its website.

The robed, but not wigged one, US District Judge Howard Matz, upheld a complaint from a pornographer Perfect 10 which said that Google of breached its copyrights.

Perfect 10 is miffed that Google's "Image Search" function, which returns a page with thumbnails that fit the searcher's query.

Matz said that because Google made money from advertisers on the basis of its search functions, it was not entitled to the same level of free use of the images as others.

Perfect 10 sells thumbnails to cell phone users and is losing money because its punters only have to download a thumbnail from Google.

The Judge wants both sides to come up with a form of a preliminary injunction preventing Google from using thumbnails.

However Matz said that Google did not violate Perfect 10's copyrights by linking to pages that Perfect 10 claims are using its images without permission.

Google said that the ruling will have no effect on the running of Google's picture search. All it will do is remove Perfect 10 companies and images from the engine.

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