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?"

Comments

Re:What a buffoon

[JWSmythe]

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. :)

You have no idea what you are talking about.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.