The Future of Search Engines
Lawsuits and complaints against YouTube have been grabbing headlines. So many ordinary people post videos to YouTube that it’s future is being followed with great interest. But the future of search engines may also be at stake, and changes to search engines could have a far greater impact on the way we use the web than any changes to YouTube will have. It’s the difference between losing some rides at an amusement park versus losing half the roads to get to the amusement park.
The legal issue hanging over search engines is their ability to give us a view of the material. The issue is encapsulated in a series of lawsuits being quietly brought by the company Perfect 10 against the major search engines. The claim of perfect 10, which publishes photographs (nude ones, but that’s not the point), is that image search results allow users access to the photos, sometimes from websites which have illegally obtained the photos, and therefore eliminates the need to purchase access from Perfect 10 - which is how the company makes its money. In fact, the company has shut down its magazine operation, allegedly because of the amount of money lost due to the search engine image service. If the economic claim and resulting damage can be proven, a court may very well see the need to curb the use of images in search engine results.
Similar legal claims have been made involving the text excerpts that search engines include in their results.
So far, legal results have been mixed and there is no clear rule on the reproduction of material from web sites by the search engines. But if the courts were to eventually find that publishing excerpts and images from sites is infringment, the way we surf the web could be drastically affected.
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