The adult magazine Perfect 10 sued Google in 2001, accusing the Mountain View company for displaying adult thumbnails that linked to illegal websites that republished their content. A US appeals court sustained that the case must be reconsidered by a lower court and reverted the ruling ordered by the first judge who analyzed the problem. Some time ago, the first court that received Perfect 10's complaint sustained that Google might be guilty for publishing adult thumbnails on its SERP but the company cannot be accused for this problem. The judge sent the case to a superior court that today reverted the ruling. Perfect 10 also accused Amazon.com for the same problem, sustaining that its adult material was distributed using the two companies.
"We reverse the district court's ruling and vacate the preliminary injunction regarding Google's use of thumbnail versions of Perfect 10's images," Sandra Ikuta wrote for a three-judge panel according to Reuters. "We reverse the district court's rejection of the claims that Google and Amazon.com are secondarily liable for infringement of Perfect 10's full size images," she added.

This is the first lawsuit that accuses Google for its image search technology because this function was quite legal until now and caused no problems fro the Mountain View firm. As you might know, the search giant is even mentioning on the image SERP that some of the pictures may be protected by copyright so Google has all the chances to win the case.

However, the Mountain View company was assaulted with complaints and lawsuits for a considerable number of its products. Beside the famous YouTube copyright infringement cases, the search giant was sent to the judge for its advertising platform because a company sustained that Google offered sponsored links for one of its products, link that redirected the users to a rival firm.