San Francisco – Google’s mission to organise all the world’s information was set back by a judge who ordered the Internet search leader to stop showing thumbnail images from porn site Perfect 10 on its Google images index.

The ruling in the copyright case may prevent the company from displaying thumbnails from other sites and could have an impact on its ambitious scheme to index the contents of millions of books, whether the copyright owners allow it or not. Google plans to appeal.

US District Court Judge A Howard Matz ordered the temporary injunction against Google to start on March 8, saying Google was “likely” to lose the case filed by Perfect 10. The ruling was made public on Tuesday.

Matz rejected Google’s argument that display of the images for the purpose of search falls under the fair-use doctrine, “despite the enormous public benefit that search engines such as Google provide”.

“Googles creation and public display of thumbnails likely do directly infringe P10’s copyrights,” the judge wrote in the 48-page ruling.

Google attorney Michael Kwun said the company would appeal.

“We anticipate that any preliminary injunction will have no effect on the vast majority of image searches, and will affect only searches related to Perfect 10,” he said. “We continue to strongly believe in the benefits of Google Image Search to our users and content providers and expect to appeal any injunction.”

“Everything that we tried to sell for a living, they were displaying for free,” Perfect 10 attorney Daniel Cooper said. – Sapa-dpa