Web search for nudity is ruled 'fair use'
A federal appeals court says Google can display tiny photos in search results, even when the images are copyrighted. — The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals on Monday reaffirmed its earlier support for the socially redeeming value of searching the Internet for nudie pictures.
Context & Ripple Effects
The 9th Circuit is closing out a fight that has run all year: back in May it first affirmed that Google's thumbnails of copyrighted images qualify as fair use (the initial appellate ruling), and Monday's decision reaffirms that position against Perfect 10's continued challenge (Ars Technica's breakdown of how 'transformative use' carried the argument).
For Google, the timing lands inside an unusually active stretch on its legal and policy front — the same court system that just blessed its most visible reuse of other people's content, weeks after a separate court struck down adult-industry record-keeping requirements (deeming age record keeping unconstitutional) and loosened one constraint around the very category of imagery at issue here.
First-order effects
- Perfect 10 loses its main legal lever against Google: with the appellate verdict reaffirmed, litigation over thumbnail display is settled in Google's favor, and image-search thumbnails stay up without licensing payments.
Second-order effects
- Rival search engines and image aggregators now inherit a courtroom-tested fair-use precedent they can invoke for their own thumbnail displays, shifting rights holders like Perfect 10 from litigation toward takedown requests as their practical remedy.
Third-order effects
- If courts keep accepting indexing-and-display as transformative fair use, the durable rule becomes that search companies may build products on others' copyrighted content while rights holders are pushed into DMCA-style controls rather than copyright lawsuits — a template whose reach beyond images remains genuinely open.
The trend: Copyright law is being rewritten around search engines' transformative reuse of third-party content, with courts' fair-use rulings — not licensing negotiations — deciding what an index may display.