Adult Site Sues Google, Google Compared To MS Again

daria42 writes "It looks like Adult magazine publisher Perfect 10 is suing Google to stop the search engine giant from using images of models in the images part of its search engine. The publisher has alleged Google is in breach of its copyright by displaying more than 3,000 photos." From the article: "Perfect 10 first became aware of Google serving up text links to other Web sites that allegedly carried copyright images of Perfect 10 models back in 2001, Zada said in an interview on Thursday. The company then sent notices to Google, under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, asking the search giant to discontinue linking to the other sites." Additionally, with users writing to mention that that Google has changed their 10 Things statement recently, yet another article comparing them to Microsoft was bound to turn up. From the Sydney Herald article: "The question is whether the young upstarts who have built a hugely profitable business on Google's anti-corporate image are on the way to following Gates's path from bright young turk to monopolistic behemoth." Update: 08/26 13:27 GMT by Z : xmas2003 points out that the requested injunction is part of the suit Perfect 10 brought against Google last November, which we have previously reported on.

Perfect Dupe

as can be seen here ... [slashdot.org]

Concrete Cam [komar.org] is up and running ... ;-)

Every one of you people are fucking stupid

You really didn't read the article, did you? And this makes it much worse than just Perfect 10 not being indexed:

"Perfect 10 first became aware of Google serving up

text links to other Web sites that allegedly carried copyright images of Perfect 10 models back in 2001, Zada said in an interview on Thursday. The company then sent notices to Google, under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, asking the search giant to discontinue linking to the other sites.

In other words, they are suing Google for not policing Perfect 10's copyright. Not for indexing Perfect 10's sites, but rather for indexing other sites who happen to have stolen Perfect 10's images. And they're not suing the other sites - they're suing Google. This would be like if the *AA immediately started suing all ISPs as if they were knowingly involved in large-scale copyright infringement.

This is scary, and I hope Perfect 10 falls flat on their ass. It's not Google's job to police everyone else's copyright and make sure that they don't index images in such a manner.

Re:Every one of you people are fucking stupid

Of course they aren't going to win any lawsuit against Google. They aren't planning to.

Had you ever heard of Perfect10 before? I hadn't. The company just spent $1,000 on lawyer bills and got themselves $1,000,000 worth of publicity. Exactly what I think they were shooting for.

It's not that simple.

They complain not that Google indexes and displays their site. They complain that people copy pics off their site, then display them on their own sites, and google indexes these sites.
IMHO bullshit. Google is not a police to check whether images they index infringe on someone's copyright. All they host are thumbnails which can be easily proven to be "fair use" for informative purposes. Then they LINK to pages that infringe on the site's copyright - and from then on, admins should send out C&D, sue and do all kinds of nasty things to admins of these sites. Once they remove the infringing content, Google will make its own indexes expire automatically, with next update. Of course assholes think it's easier to make Google remove the links, removing all traffic to the competing sites at once, instead of hunting each of them separately, but it seems all they can get is waste a lot on lawyers and have the case thrown out of court.
If I make a photo of a pile of CDs, with purpose to put it in a newspaper, I don't copy them, and in no way I'm responsible about finding out whether they are pirated or original. Same with thumbnails of images found on various sites. Google states the fact: "This site has these images". Determining legal status of that site having these images is completely offtopic.

Wayback machine has the previous list

Archive.org's cache of Google's Ten-Things list:
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.google.com /corporate/tenthings.html [archive.org]

Google is sued because they have the money

What is happening is that some random people took some "Perfect 10" images, either from P10's publicly available previews, or by any other means. Then these same random people have put up their own web site with these selfsame images, without permission from P10.

Finally these sites were harvested by Google and indexed.

So who is committing copyright infrigement again?

If anything Google should be thanked for providing a link to the people's website who took the images without permission, allowing them to be perhaps identified. P10 should be suing *them*.

But no, it's too much work and they probably are just a bunch of amateur with little to no money, so P10 is choosing to sue Google instead. Guess why.

How this has anything to to with Google's alleged "arrogance" we'll never know.

"Arrogant" is another term for successful people who are onto a good thing and they know it. Many can't take somebody else's success. So Apple, Microsoft and now Google are "arrogant".

Personnally I'm delighted that Google is doing so well. So far everybody benefits, including mere users. At least we have Microsoft running scared a little. In the past this meant they react intelligently and fast (like in the case of the web browser for win95) but these days they take the PR approach a bit more.

We'll see what happens.
 

Google

Whilst everyone else bar a select few are completely misunderstanding the reasoning behind Perfect 10 sueing Google (hint: robots.txt wouldn't solve it and yes, it's still dumb) I notice with interest that although Google has updated their page, they have the decency to point out that they have:

* Full-disclosure update: When we first wrote these "10 things" four years ago, we included the phrase "Google does not do horoscopes, financial advice or chat." Over time we've expanded our view of the range of services we can offer -- web search, for instance, isn't the only way for people to access or use information -- and products that then seemed unlikely are now key aspects of our portfolio. This doesn't mean we've changed our core mission; just that the farther we travel toward achieving it, the more those blurry objects on the horizon come into sharper focus (to be replaced, of course, by more blurry objects).

Far better than just changing it on the sly and hoping no-one will notice.

Enough already with this M$ comparision!

Feel free to compares Google and M$ when Google requires all PC OEMs to include a browser that will only display their Web site and Google penalizes these companies if they attempt to provide a browser that will display non-Google pages. Oh, and when Google builds and operating system and only provides their services/apps to that OS. Oh yeah, and when they use their marketshare to rebrand technologies that will only work with their upcoming OS.

Let's make an effort here to make the point that there might be some similar aspects to Google and Microsoft, but this bland statement of comparision is silly.

Re:robots.txt

Strangely enough, these people are suing google for the actions of others. They are suing google because google's webcrawler doesn't automatically block sites containing their copyrighted works. They're basically saying it's Google's job to police the entire web to enforce their copyrights. They have no case, because they would have to prove under the DMCA that Google was built to facilitate the copying of copyrighted works. Not only that, but it'd be difficult to say that they are circumventing a copyright protection scheme because the pictures are not protected by anything more elaborate than password protection on the website. They'll lose and they're dumb for wasting the time filing the suit. This is a real good example of a frivolous lawsuit.
James

Re:robots.txt

Strangely enough, these people are suing google for the actions of others. They are suing google because google's webcrawler doesn't automatically block sites containing their copyrighted works. They're basically saying it's Google's job to police the entire web to enforce their copyrights.

Replace Google with Napster and Perfect 10 with the RIAA. Is this really such an open and shut case in favor of Google?

Re:robots.txt

The images aren't from Perfect 10 directly. They wants Google to stop linking to other sites that have (potentially illegal) copies of their copyrighted images. So to put it in really simple terms, Perfect 10 wants Google to enforce their copyrights for them. Seems to me that the burden of copyright enforcement is on the owner of said rights and Google isn't doing anything to aid in misappropriation of copyrighted material. Throwing the DMCA claim on top just adds to the absurdity. Personally, I hope these guys get crushed in court for trying to pull a stunt like this.

Re:robots.txt

Then the suit should be filed against the websites illegally serving their copyrighted images, not Google.

Re:robots.txt

Yeah, and I'm sure google can help Perfect 10 find them and help put the people away since they have the pictures cached with the URL. Case closed, but no, go after the one that has more money is always the way people go these days. Not after the real criminals.

Re:robots.txt

Then.. uh... shouldn't Perfect 10 be going after the real offenders, and not the index server which simply aggrigates all of the images that fit the searched terms?

To me, it looks like everyone and their mother is trying to cash in on Google. They're such a huge target that they're easy to attack with lawsuits. This actually does make them like Microsoft, but unlike Microsoft, Google doesn't have a legal department the size of Kentucky to back it up... give it time though.

Who knows, I might sue Google for aggrigating my slashdot comments! That's about as frivilous as this lawsuit is.

Re:robots.txt

Are they asking for money, or just asking Google to take down the links once they've been notified of the offending content? I wouldn't call it "cashing in" if they're just asking for the links to be taken down. I have other problems with it, but it's not "cashing in."

Re:what's that word again?

So a porn publisher whose whole business is built on exploitation

Only if you take the axiom that "Porn = Exploitation". If you're not a social conservative, and believe that people should be allowed to show their tits for money if they want to, your analogy simply doesn't

I do things for money that I wouldn't ordinarily do. It's called "gainful employment".

Re:Publicity

Is anyone else getting the feeling that this whole "Google is actually evil like Microsoft" theme could easily be the beginnings of a FUD campaign organised by - who else - Microsoft?

So far Google hasn't don't anything worthy of being called "evil". Seems like some people are just digging for anything at all that can be said against them.

Daniel

Re:Publicity

It would be interesting to see the breakdown on people who are starting to dislike google. What percent are genuinely upset about their business practices, and what percent are upset that they are doing well (sort of like when a new band gets big, and the "original" fans say they have "sold out") No man! I heard of them first! Let me show you this receipt for a band t-shirt dated THREE days before the new song charted, dude!
There is a group of people who will never like any company or group that is succesful. And there will always be people who attack the leaders just because they are leading, whether it is the NY Yankees (I try not to be one of them, but alas, I live in Ohio and I am a Cleveland fan) or google.

Re:Publicity

You are indeed correct, sir.
Large is Evil.
Any organization bigger than a jazz combo is, by its inherent nature, Satanic

Re:Publicity

Yeah, it's pretty rich for someone using the DMCA to accuse the receipient of such notices of being evil.

Re:Publicity

I'm completely with you. I went to the fuckedgoogle site that /. posted yesterday, and the guy who's writing that is just a crackpot. In one post he accused google of manipulating their stock price while SIMULTANEOUSLY saying they were going to have the biggest point loss in the history of the company. I'm sorry, but I fail to see why they'd manipulate their own stock price down.
And the privacy concerns? So they keep a record of searches. I don't care. They do so many that it's impossible for anyone to come up with useful data from google. All you'll be able to tell is that lots of people search for porn.
Microsoft earned its title of "most evil" because they single-mindedly destroy all of their competition through FUD and other BS. Google hasn't really gotten rid of any of their competition (Yahoo and MSN are still there--I can't really think of a "large" web portal that's not there anymore) and that doesn't seem to be their goal. Just to do what they do best. I certainly have heard more reporting of this than I've heard anyone I know complain about google. Usually when the media outlets are pushing something, it's a good idea to take it with a grain of salt.

offtopic- Kos at dailykos said yesterday that he thinks dailykos could become larger than slashdot, hits per day wise, before the end of the year--people called pullshit, but I'm really kind of interested now.

Re:Publicity

So Microsoft's latest strategy for smearing its competitors is to launch a FUD campaign in which... wait for it... their competitors get called "as evil as Microsoft?"

Hmmm. Something not quite right here. What could the MS spindroids be thinking?

"Hey, I just had an excellent idea for a fudwave..."
"Yeah?" (puts down bimbo and cigar for a second)
"Look.. we're evil, right?"
"Damn right! I mean, unfortunately, yes...?"
"I mean, we tried to fix that - the Foundation, pocket money for Africa, Bill even visited some schools..."
"People always want a villain, I guess that's us..."
"So, since Google refuse to compete fairly with us, here's the plan... We're going to redefine the meaning of 'evil'..."
"uh?"
"Lots of PR about 'Google is evil too, just like MS'"
"Solid! And then, 'IBM is evil'"
"Yup. Then, 'Linux is evil' and so on. Eventually people gonna start associating 'evil' with 'cool', and then we'll be there"
"Sigh. Been a long time since we were cool."
"OK, call in some favours. I think Perfect-10 still owe us for that time with the Senator."
"Trollboys online?"
"Yup. Ready to go!" ...

It might just work.

I suspect something 'Darl' like is in play here.

Show me a porn site that doesn't want people's browsers sent its way. Half of spam sent is trying to achieve that effect (okay and infect you with spayware and other creepy crawlies.)

They must be be getting their money some other way than by earning it.

So who are the players here? What links are there to some competition. (And there must already be a way to tell search 'bots' to ignore subdirectories so this suit is nothing but a legal annoyance, not a valid suit.)

Re:Bad habits die hard...

It's more stupid than that.

They're suing Google for indexing images off *other* sites that are hosting their copyrighted images without permission. They basically want Google (and A9) to police their copyright for them.

that's Godwin

One 'o', you fucking nazi!