Nature of the Case
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Facts
P is a professional photographer who has copyrighted many of his images of the American West. Some of these images are located on P's website or other websites with which P has a license agreement. D operates an internet search engine that displays its results in the form of small pictures rather than the more usual form of text. D obtained its database of pictures by copying images from other websites. D developed a computer program that 'crawls' the web looking for images to index. This crawler downloads full-sized copies of the images onto Arriba's server. The program then uses these copies to generate smaller, lower-resolution thumbnails of the images. Once the thumbnails are created, the program deletes the full-sized originals from the server. Although a user could copy these thumbnails to his computer or disk, she cannot increase the resolution of the thumbnail; any enlargement would result in a loss of clarity of the image. By clicking on one of these small pictures, called 'thumbnails,' the user can then view a large version of that same picture within a pop-up web page on the D website. If the user double-clicks on the thumbnail the program links to the original website where the picture was scrapped from. This in-line linking allows the site owner to import a graphic from a source website and incorporate it into one's own website, creating the appearance that the in-lined graphic is a seamless part of the second web page. The full image from in-line linking comes directly from the originating website and is not copied onto D's server, but the user would not realize that the image actually resided on another website. D's crawler visited websites that contained P's photographs. The crawler copied thirty-five of P's images to the D database. D objected to the use. D deleted the thumbnails of images that came from P's own websites and placed those sites on a list of sites that it would not crawl in the future. P then sued D over other images of his that came from third-party websites. D deleted those thumbnails and placed those third-party sites on a list of sites that it would not crawl in the future. P sued D for copyright infringement and violation of 17 U.S.C. § 1202(b) for removal of the images’ copyright-management information (CMI). Both parties moved for summary judgment.
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