Porn Site Sues Google Over Linked Images

Joel from Sydney writes "According to the Sydney Morning Herald, Google is being sued for copyright infringement by a Los Angeles-based porn site. The complaint revolves around Google's Image Search, which allegedly displays copyrighted pictures and links to unauthorised mirrors. The complaint also alleges that Google Search is providing 'links to password hacking sites that provide ways to gain illegal access to [the complainant's] website.' Where will it all end? (Note: free registration may be required to view the article)." The same AP story is being carried by eWeek, no registration required. Reader Nath adds "Interesting that there's no Thank You from the site for the traffic that Google sends its way due to search hits; are these companies forgetting the important role that search engines play in their business?"

What a buffoon

He can't insert a ROBOTS.TXT file and can't seem to handle his passwd file, and he wants to sue Google for his ineptitude?

I hope they squash him and don't give him a plug-nickel in "settlement".

Re:What a buffoon

According to teh article it seems to stem more from Google linking to sites that have illegal copies of thier images and ways to illegally get into their site.

Re:What a buffoon

Show us the pictures and we will decide!

Re:What a buffoon

Well, there are two things that they're complaining about. I may have a bit more understanding of this, since I do quite a bit of work with the adult industry.

Joe user wants into some-porn-site.com, he goes to google and types in "some-porn-site.com passwordz", and probably gets 1000 responses with sites that are listing their 'hacked' passwords.

They get the majority of these passwords with programs like Access Diver (I think that's the name), and a very few where the hackers actually find an exploit in the billing companies password submission script, to insert their own passwords. These passwords are almost never gathered from the password itself. Hell, the format for an Apache password file is [user]:[crypted password], so the password file really doesn't do you much good, other than giving you a list of usernames to plug into Access Diver.

A few sites I deal with show up regularly on about 1000 of these sites. Honest. It's a pretty serious problem for a lot of adult webmasters. We have routines in place to take care of the problem before it becomes a problem, but 10,000 extra users in an hour can be enough to knock a server off the Internet (the slashdot effect is nothing compared to these sites), and if undetected quickly can effectively shut down a site simply because of the bandwidth bill.

Our passwords die after about 3 minutes of being abused, but back in the day, we'd see over 100k users come in from one 'stolen' password. We still see the users coming in, but they're all being rejected, which is fine by me. Hell, the biggest site they hit is only $25/year. Who can't afford $2/month for porn?

It only takes a half way decent programmer a little bit of time to fix this. Hell, I wrote the first version of a protection script years ago, in about an hour.

But, this was only half of their complaint. What they're trying to pitch a fit about is the fact that Google links their copyrighted images on a site that has them illegally posted.

We get a lot of this too. People steal the images from our big sites, even though they have a watermark on them, in them, etc, etc. These people don't even bother to rename the pictures most of the time, so they still have our serialized filename on them. Brilliant. Anyways, a lot of these people are hard to take down. We can complain to ISP's, but sometimes that's close to impossible. I don't speak Russian, Chineses, etc, etc, so how do I call to complain at a foreign ISP? We keep a small staff fairly busy tracking down these sites, and trying to get our content removed.

But the real truth is, he hopes to make some money off of Google, which he'll probably never see. The bigger truth is that eWeek carried the story, and it was picked up by AP, which means it'll show up in publications all over the world. It'll mostly be carried as either a novelty story, or something of how evil porn is to attack Google. Regardless, his site name has been thrown up in front of millions of people. He's charging $25.50/month. If he gets even a small percentage of those people to buy, that's mad money. Well, the really mad money is in the number of people who will buy a subscription, forget they have it and let it recur for years. Or the ones too embarassed to call to cancel, and just live with it til their wife finds out. :)

So Slashdot just helped him make a fortune. How many horny girlfriend-less guys are there on here, who would pay for a bit of porn. :) Lucky for me, I have a girlfriend, and I have all the free porn a guy could ever want. It's really tough doing work for so many diverse companies, I get just about anything that's Internet based for free. :)

Re:What a buffoon

Hell, the format for an Apache password file is [user]:[crypted password], so the password file really doesn't do you much good

Actually, it does you a lot of good if you are into cracking .htaccess security. Just because that password is hashed doesnt mean it cant be bruteforced (which I admit can take some time), and I will wager than 90% of passwords on any site you have worked on where the user gets to choose their password can be cracked with a fairly simple wordlist.

A 'hacker' (using the term loosly) that want their porn for themselves only needs to get one of those passwords, and even someone planning to share will only need a few.

Other than that glaring inaccuracy, a very interesting post :o)

Re:What a buffoon

Illegal how? What if I tell you that www.bazbar.org has copies of pictures from www.foobar.com that they're offering for free download? Am *I* now breaking the law? That's all google is doing really. They don't even know that they're doing it, as it's entirely automated, so there isn't even any willfullness about it.

Re:What a buffoon

Google's image search doesn't just tell you where the images are it displays them on Googles page. Google is making a copy of copyrighted images and storing them in there index.

Google displays thumbnails, not copies of the original images.

You have no idea what you are talking about.

Image resolution has nothing to do with copyrights.

Wrong. In this particular case it actually has quite a lot to do with whether copyright is enforceable. [gigalaw.com]

Re:What a buffoon

He is suing because Google has indexed unauthorized mirror sites, not his own site. This is a bit scary, because I think what Google is doing might actually be considered illegal, because the pictures are copyrighted.

IANAL, so I can't speak to the actual, technical legal isssue -- but it seems to me highly unreasonable to expect a third party like Google to vet all the sites and images it links to for copyright violations. I can understand why Perfect 10 is suing the mega-popular American company with deep pockets rather than the offshore web sites owned by people who may very well be impossible to trace. But is Google to blame for that?

Now, the article didn't say anything about this, but I wonder if Perfect 10 had previously identified these sites and requested that Google remove them from its index? If so, I'd be more sympathetic to their case.

Re:What a buffoon

He is suing because Google has indexed unauthorized mirror sites

Really, it comes down to this: he's suing Google because he can't sue those mirror sites. They're just following the Lawyer's Axiom of Transitivity: if A is related to B and B is related to C then if A sues B and B has no money, then A must sue C.

Eric
Why the Vioxx recall [ericgiguere.com] reduced spam (parody)

Hrm... Perfect 10?

If I remember correctly, their porno was no good anyway.

Geeks, boycott Perfect 10! They'll run out of money!

I hope that

Google's response is to remove any link to their website from their search results. As soon as they see the drastic decline in new visitors, they'll come crawling back.

Re:I hope that

they'll come crawling back.

Isn't crawling what started all this in the first place?

"Allure of naked women"

From the article:

Perfect 10 publisher Norm Zada said he is targeting Google because the company is using the allure of naked women to draw more visitors to its site and generate more advertising revenue.

Riiiiggght. That's been Google's business model all along! Now that you mention it, the two "O's" in Google do kind of look like giant breasts! Who knew I was using a porn search engine all along???

Please, this is ridiculous. I'd hate to see Google settle with these idiots.

"rogue" web sites

Google displays the images from rogue Web sites operated in foreign countries, according to Perfect 10's lawsuit

So they're not suing google for linking to images on their own servers, but for linking to images on someone else's site who they don't have the energy to go after. (Or perhaps just b/c google has deeper pockets). I wonder whether google will bother to fight it; this could probably be settled with some $ and then google could quietly close their images search since they didn't bother much to maintain it anyway. But if google can be sued for linking to material on other servers, it will seriously decrease the functionality of the internet. Not for free porn - I'm pretty sure that is on the net to stay - but for more useful information. The beauty of an automatic search engine is lost if someone has to screen every link for illicit content; eventually nobody will want the hassle of running a free search engine.

Bah! Who needs this Perfect 10 site...

When we have free sites like goatse, lemonparty and tubgirl?

You bastard!

I've previously had Goatse and Tubgirl inflicted upon my eyes, but when I saw your post, I thought "Lemonparty? What the hell is that?"

Now I know. But that was your idea all along, wasn't it? Bastard!

Sounds more like a ploy...

..to get their name in the news. Wouldn't be surprised if they had the press releases sent out before drawing up any claims.

Perfect 10's business model

Like some former Unix vendors, Perfect 10 seems to have moved into the litigation business.

Credit companies sued over porn IP [law.com]: "A Beverly Hills pornographer is ... filing a copyright and trademark suit against Visa International Service Association and MasterCard International Inc. The porn company says that without the support of these financial institutions, infringers wouldn't be able to steal their stuff."

Which failed [yahoo.com]: "U.S. District Judge James Ware tossed out a copyright and trademark infringement suit brought against Visa International Service Association and MasterCard International Inc. by Perfect 10 Inc....`A lot of copyright [litigation] is being pushed by pornographers who are trying to take advantage of cases brought by more mainstream media,' Bridges [representing MasterCard] said."

Article with more information

This xbiz article [xbiz.com] (ads on that page are NSFW) has more information about the lawsuit:

In a letter to Google in June, Perfect 10 attorneys wrote that Internet users can find certain infringed-upon images by "doing advanced Google searches using the model name on the second line and 'nude' on the first line. So, for example, the first URL below was found by doing an advanced Google search using 'nude' and 'Monika Zsibrit.'"

The suit alleges Google committed 12 counts of intellectual property violations against Perfect 10 magazine and the website, including trademark dilution, wrongful use of a registered trademark and unfair competition.

I wonder why Perfect 10 didn't just use the DMCA to make Google remove/hide the links to the infringing pages. Google has complied with such DMCA requests in the past and has even published a DMCA Policy [google.com]. It is interesting that the suit mentions trademark dilution, wrongful use of a registered trademark, and unfair competition rather than (or maybe in addition to) copyright/DMCA violation.

How things change...

If they got the pictures, then Mr. pr0n company needs to somehow protect them better.

It's funny how people's morals change to suit them. Nicking images off someone else's site without permission used to be regarded as rude at best, and very rude indeed if you were actually linking using their bandwidth from your site. That was nothing to do with copyright (though I suspect that issue is pretty clear-cut here anyway) and simply a matter of polite netiquette. When did nicking someone else's graphics become socially acceptable?

Re:How things change...

When the images became prOn

Re:It's not Google's fault.

"And instead of suing Google for providing a link to some page that allows one to exploit their site, why not make something more secure?"

Hate to sound like I'm defending them, but they can't. You can't prevent an image from being reposted elsewhere. All it takes is to subscribe to the site and capture the images. They're really in the wrong business if they're facing serious damages because other sites are carrying their images.

I've ... researched this topic quite heavily. It'd be very easy for them to generate revenue by these mirror sites. Put their name on the images, assuming they're not doing that already. Why? Because when one spots a pic they like, and they wanna see more from the same series, one needs to know where the images came from.

There's opportunity everywhere. :P

Re:sigh..

And you should learn to Read The Fucking Post You're Quoting! His point was this: How is it Google's fault that other people infringed their copyright?

Google isn't the one who committed the infringment. That's why the lawsuit is absurd.

Re:What's with people?

Do you think it's pure coincidence that when a company does things that Slashdotters like (IBM recently, Google, etc.), everybody develops a soft spot?

Are you old enough to remember when Google first hit the scene a few years ago? Yahoo, AltaVista, and all the other old-line search engines were becoming noticeably less useful every day, as opportunists found better and better ways of link-spamming the robots that fed those sites. The search engines themselves didn't seem to respond at all, which made searching more and more frustrating every day. In some cases (Yahoo comes to mind), the site pages became so bloated and portalesque that they offended aesthetics and load-time guidlines.

I remember clearly the first few weeks I was using Google: it was so refreshingly simple and clean, and it loaded in a snap. There was almost no link spam in the results, less than Yahoo by a factor of 100 for most searches. And there were no annoying, distracting ads. It was like paradise had been reborn.

Nowadays, that's not quite so true. Google has gotten more bloated than it used to be, but they've kept it pretty thin, all told. And they added advertisements, but kept them out of the normal flow of results and text-based only, which is a lot less aggravating to process in sight. And while the results occasionally get cocked up by spam, Google actively works to keep its results relevant by tweaking its algorithms and pruning spammers.

Also, I remember the rumors that started flying about various search engines raising revenues by selling hit placements, possibly without any on-the-spot notification to the user. This really offends the senses, because search engines lose value when the results aren't neutral and unbiased. Google does search-related ads, but in such a way that you trust what you see is aboveboard.

That's why everybody loves Google so much--they've consistently demonstrated a lot of concern for their customers, in ways that put them head and shoulders above the rest of the industry (and corporate entities in general, I'd imagine). Heck, Google is better behaved than most people I know!

We like them because they seem to be looking out for us.