CNN Money.com berichtet über eine bedrohliche Entwicklung für Google und Co:
The most successful Internet companies have grown rich by exploiting other people’s content — without paying for it.
AOL prospered as its members filled chat rooms. EBay thrives by selling other people’s stuff. Teens create the pages on News Corp.’s MySpace. Yahoo! and Google index all this content, and much more… An unfolding legal battle between Perfect 10, an „adult“ magazine, and Google is all about who gets to profit from content on the Web. On Feb. 21, a U.S. District Court Judge named A. Howard Matz ruled that Google’s image search function had violated the law by copying, without permission, photographs of naked women created by Perfect 10; such copying, the judge said, violated the magazine’s intellectual property rights.
Judge Matz’s ruling explores some new legal territory, which we’ll touch on in a moment because his decision has implications for other pending lawsuits against Google. It also highlights the challenge facing anyone trying to make money from creating online content.
