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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?"
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.
Google caches a small thumbnail image. When you look at a page of GIS results you are not loading the image off the website, you are looking at google's cache of that image. This is 100% legal. It's also just plain good sense, otherwise all the thumbnailed webservers would have to serve up a 300k image every time someone searched for something that linked to it.
Never mind the robots.txt.
;)
Isn't that what this is for in the first place?
If they're not going to use it properly, then it should be stricken from the books
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
IIRC it's called mens rea. Only applies to crimes, not civil suits. Of course, different jurisdictions have different rules...
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.
:)
:) 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. :)
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.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
booble (www.booble.com)
Google displays thumbnails, not copies of the original images.
Credit companies sued over porn IP: "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: "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."
That's about the same thing as downloading copyrighted high-res photos from some news agency site and reducing resolution and publishing them as part of a news article.
My quality social news site.com.
They did. Perfect 10 Wants Alleged Infringers Removed From Google (#1)
> I believe the courts have upheld google's image index is legal before.
m attrolls _archive.html4 .html?tag=f d_lede2_hedm l#cached
Jesus! You believe!
And I believe they have not.
Can you point us to info on which you base your belief?
I've found these interesting pages:
1. Dubioius Nature of Google Cache:
http://mattrolls.blogspot.com/2003_07_13_
2. Similar Lawsuit and Discussion of Legality on CNet.com:
http://news.com.com/2100-1038_3-102423
3. How to Prevent Google From Caching Your Content:
http://www.google.com/webmasters/faq.ht
On a related note, while Google is benefitial to most sites, it does not give them the right to assist in piracy or content theft.
As it is possible to disable this "feature" for one's own site, noone has sued yet.
Still, I think the default should be not to cache and people should enable it if they wanted to.
you are = you're
they are = they're
their content (content that belongs to them)
are not = aren't
and it's buffoon not bafoon
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.
Do you all have some emotional conenction to Google or something?
/. mentality which is to be against those that exploit and take advantage of copyright,patents, etc. over the internet. People on /. are very concerned about what happens to the internet. Bullshit companies out to make a quick dollar are going to ruin it.
People aren't acting overly pro-google. They are acting inline with the normal
The pornographer has a few other options beyond not distributing his .htaccess file and having a robots.txt to keep googlebot away.
One that jumps readily to mind is to check the refering URL when a request for an image is made and to only send the graphic if the referrer is on an "approved" list of sites. Otherwise, return a 401, 403 or 404 error for the graphic.
If he's using Apache on his site, there's an example in the Apache documentation on how to set that up.
That won't stop "pirates" who have access to the site via a passworded account or a valid affiliate site, but it should cut down on automated bot-raping of his graphics.
Just be sure to wear the gold uniform when you beam down -- you know what happens when you wear the red one.
>Image resolution has nothing to do with copyrights.
1)I didn't say there was no copyright issue. I was refuting a post that said the original images were copied on Google.
2)But though the thumbnails are arguably derivative works, they're fair use. In Kelly v. Arriba Soft "The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in February 2002 held that posting thumbnails of another's aesthetic photos is a fair use when done for information-gathering or indexing purposes."
That's about the same thing as downloading copyrighted high-res photos from some news agency site and reducing resolution and publishing them as part of a news article.
Not that analogies can prove anything, but Google's thumbnails are much to small for most guys to jerk off to, which is the purpose of the original hi-res images. In your analogy the surfer would never know of or visit the original site; Google's image search function is to direct surfers there.
Perfect 10's claim isn't against Google making thumbnails anyway, it's that they link to sites with copies of the original images.