I think the lawsuit you are talking about is the image linking suit, Perfect
10 v. Google. Information on this lawsuit can be found at:
http://www.eff.org/cases/perfect-10-v-google

I haven't read the decision, but the EFF says "While it leaves some
questions open, the bottom line is that the Court upheld important policies
of fair use and freedom online and resisted Perfect 10's plea to put
copyright owners completely in charge of how and when search engines and
other online intermediaries can provide their users with links to images."

Edward

On Thu, Aug 7, 2008 at 4:48 PM, David Pattern <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> > Publishers make their covers available to them and to others because
> > they desperately want their covers out there. You can get covers from
> > publishers with amazing ease. I do not suspect Amazon or Syndetics
> > have licensed the covers in any way.
>
> Having worked for a number of years for a children's library book supplier
> in the mid 1990s in the UK, I can concur with Tim -- all of the publishers
> we dealt with (which included all of the major players) were more than happy
> to supply us with book cover scans to use on our web site.  The only issue
> for us was the wide variety in quality (from tiny GIFs to massive TIFFs), so
> we ended up doing all of the cover scanning ourselves inhouse (again, the
> publishers we're happy for us do this).
>
> On the subject of copyright, wasn't there a recent case brought against
> Google's Image Search where the judge ruled that thumbnails do not violate
> the copyright of the original image?
>
> regards
> Dave Pattern
> University of Huddersfield
>
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