Ditto.com is a search engine that allows computer users to find photographs and other images on the Web. Type in "Tiger Woods" and you'll get a page containing thumbnail images of the golfing great copied from other sites on the Internet, along with links to those sites.
The question is: Are those copies stolen images?
They are according to some artists and photographers who are pursuing a lawsuit aimed squarely at one of the key features of the Internet: search engines' practice of making copies of other people's content and storing them in databases for easy retrieval by Web surfers.
In a recent decision, a U.S. District Court judge in Santa Ana said Ditto.com of Naperville, Ohio, did not violate copyright laws when it copied photographs from Web sites operated by Huntington Beach photographer Leslie A. Kelly, who sued the search engine. Ditto's action, said Judge Gary L. Taylor, amounted to "fair use" of the photographs.
Trade groups representing Kelly and thousands of other artists have mounted an appeal of Taylor's ruling, which is expected to become final this week.
Intellectual-law experts say the case has far-reaching implications for search engines and the Internet. Until the judge's opinion, experts were unclear whether search engines such as Yahoo, AltaVista and Excite, among others, trampled the rights of copyright holders when they copied and indexed portions of their articles, illustrations and other protected works.
"The issue of copying on the Internet has been of great concern because, after all, the Internet is nothing more than a giant copying machine," said John Shepard Wiley Jr., a UCLA law professor who also teaches intellectual property law to federal judges. "Because this is the first case that addresses the issue, it gives us the clearest picture of what the rules will be."
If the judge had reached the opposite result, Wiley said, he could have outlawed a common practice by search engines that makes it easy for computer users to find information on the Internet.
Mark A. Lemley, a professor of law at UC Berkeley's Boalt Hall School of Law and a director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology, agrees. "If you come to any different result, search engines would be illegal, and the Internet would come to a screeching halt," he said. "If you don't have search engines, you don't have an Internet."
