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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?"
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".
I have something in common with Stephen Hawking...
If I remember correctly, their porno was no good anyway.
Geeks, boycott Perfect 10! They'll run out of money!
Jay | http://oldos.org
is change the web addresses of their images, since google never updates their image database...
If they got the pictures, then Mr. pr0n company needs to somehow protect them better. And it's not like it's Ansel Adams photography either.
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?
Yet another company guilty of doing things The American Way.
-- n
They should learn to use robots.txt files, and as for the other sites, it's those that are infringing on copyrights, not Google so if they should sue any, it's the wrong company. But, of course, Google probably have more money they can try to get. :-P
:-P
Google should just say "oh, sorry we listed you incorrectly" and block their domain.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
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.
What?
You can use the Google Image Search (GIS) on non-porn related searches. Try using GIS under the search engine "cheeseburgers". This has no merit.
GIS works so well, that quite frankly, any search could potentially lead to an adult image.
Yes! I listen to NYC Speedcore and do math at 3AM. I suggest you try it too.
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.
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.
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.
When we have free sites like goatse, lemonparty and tubgirl?
She's built like a steak house, but she handles like a bistro....
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
Google looses, they win
Google wins, they win
..to get their name in the news. Wouldn't be surprised if they had the press releases sent out before drawing up any claims.
Wanna get nasty? - DaNasty
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I have always had an issue with Google providing copyrighted images on its site through this service. They should probably be asking each copyright holder for permission first, like every other site on the net. I realise this is not feasible, and is simply avoided by a robots.txt file, but the onus should be on Google to ask for permission rather then the copyright holder to prevent unauthorised copying. It's any wonder something like this hasn't come up sooner.
It seems that this is a test case the EFF has been waiting for for years: Specifically, should search engines be expected to be the policemen of the internet? The other posts seem to think this is a spidering issue that can be resolved with robots.txt. In truth robots.txt is irrelevant because this guy isn't suing over Google's cache of his own website. He is suing over Google suing other people's websites. In other words he is suing Google because Google, by allowing search, is facilitating people to locate images that might have been stolen from his site.
Fascinating, no? This is the exact sort of precedent that would argue you could sue Google because you can find P2P apps there, or if you can find an illegal mirror of an Isaac Asimov book Asimov's estate could sue Google while ignoring the mirror. And this case is being put forward by an inherently publicly unsympathetic defendant: a porn site. I will be curious to see where this goes.
They only show thumbnails and keep out context, it is such a small portion that it is "fair use". The companies complaint is that illegal foreign websites are illegaly showing their images and google is finding them. The company should be going after the illegel websites but international law is a bitch and Google obviously has deeper pockets. I have no doubt that Google will squish them though, this is nonsense. Welcome to the internet.
Regards,
Steve
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?
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Ok, I suppose I need a lawyer to sort this out for me, For something like this, dont you need to prove Guilty Intent? Or is that for other types of law? I'd heard, (And this was in my Grade 11 law class mind you) That to be found guilty, someone had to make the decision to break a law, there are special considerations for either altered states of mind, But a guilty action, by accident, is not nearly held to the same degree of consequences as a guilty action by intent? Anyways, someone setting me clear on this would be nice,
This is rediculous. This company is suing Google for crawling the web and recording images and information that have been stolen from the website in question by OTHER PEOPLE! They are suing Google because losers in other coutries pay the $25/month and then copy the images to their own site. Google's spider then finds them. Its not Google's fault that this site's customer's are misusing the site's content. Nor is it Google's fault that other people have decided to hand out their own passwords to the site.
Google is simply crawling the web... any legitimate judge will correct this pr0n company and make them go after the people who are actually cheating them...
Just another case of "go after the big guy cos he has more money that the little guys that are actually causing the problem". I hope the web site goes out of business and the sleeze bags go to hell...
But of course, it had to happen. Google now has money and is now an obvious target for the litigous sort of bottom feeders who aren't to converned with whom they blame -- as long as it is someone they can bully, extort or push into bankruptcy. Google, of course, has money, so they'll extort them.
I certainly hope that the courts will decide that Google cannot be blamed for not keeping track of what chunk of data represents someone's property or not, and whether said property is served from the site the owners intend it to. This is silly.
Then again, so is the judicial system since you can never be sure of the outcome of such a case. Unless, of course, one of the parties is willing to commit more money to the case than the other. You can always buy a victory in the courts, if not formally, then in effect.
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.'
;)
It's mind-numbingly easy to catch pirated passwords... All you need is to log the IPs of people logging in. Any password used from more than say 5 completely different IPs (not part of the same subnet) within an hour is pirated. How hard can that be to program?
Too hard I guess...
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
How is this any different than caching the text of a website? For that matter, who gives Google the right to crawl my websites? Well, ME of course. The web is a public place. Most websites want traffic, those that don't can use a robots.txt file. It's the de facto standard, and every legitimate web crawler will obey it. Plus, every web designer either knows about it, or can Google it to find out about it.
In other words, I call PR stunt. A well executed one, I might add.
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."
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.
This xbiz article (ads on that page are NSFW) has more information about the lawsuit:
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. 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.
The shareholder is always right.
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!
Google does use and respect the robots.txt tag and it is no problem to ask it not to index folders on your personal site. If someone is illegally using your content then it is the persons providing it who are the problem, not the spider that mirrors the site. Spiders may carry illegal and copyrighted content, yes, but since spiders tend to drop the cached eventually if the original site goes down, the problem is still best solved by removing the site with the bad content.
.htaccess to prevent anyone and thing from using my images without having the right url as referrer. This is easy to do and perfect for preventing other sites of linking directly to given file types like swf, jpg and png.
I personally use a smooth
How you and your content appear in search engines is entirely up to you.
Some porn providers actually encourage you to to use their content under some license terms, this is how I got the content for the instant wank galleries at hardcoretorrents.com. Perhaps the porn provider just needs to provide the content they feel other people are violating under better terms?
Why anyone would be foolish enough to ask to be removed from Google is something I do not understand. The hits generated from them, at least according to my logs, is extremely valuable and important. More visitors, more income is true in most cases. And my logs clearly indicate that if I was to be removed from Google, then the number of daily visitors at my torrent site bt.g.la and other sites would go down. It's that simple.
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
I find Google very useful, I don't want it made less useful becuase of some stupid lawsuit.
"Why do you care about such a company?"
First off, why shouldn't we care about companies ? They are a large part of everyones daily experience nowadays.
Secondly I like using Google, I like the image search and I realise that if this porn company gets anywhere with this case then google will become less usefull. I wouldn't like that to happen so I am supporting google in this.
Serious question time but in the culture of "litigate like mad", where do we stop?
This porn company is sueing bacause of copyright infringement, what next do we sue Google for next; because if you search for something you wrote, and someone else has stolen it without using your copyright (e.g. some software I wrote), or the GPL is being violated, etc... Then we *must* sue google for this crime. Do we have to appoint someone to check *every* google link?
If it is found that google is guity, then they have aided and abetied a crime.
Consider *any* terrorist who uses google to search for the group to join, who then go on to commit a 9/11 type attack. Do we sue google for aiding and abeting mass murder? Are the directors *personally* liable? Are the staff? Are the shareholders? Does the US put on trial, and if found guily, execute a few hundred/thousand/million people for their "part" in this crime? Or what happens if another school mass killing is found to have occured and the people who carried out the act used Goggle to find out information, or to find an ammo supplier etc..
Where do we draw the line with stupid litigation? When will people stand up and take responsability for *their* acts, *their* incompentances, *their* failings, rather than blaming others. Or when will the correct people be blamed for *their* acts rather than trying to off-load the blame onto others??
and breathe
Jaj - wondering when sense will prevail in the US courts.
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.
Google and others should adopt a policy such as:
IF you threaten to sue us due to any content that we link to, simply send us the domain names in question and we will completely forever remove any links to your sites.
Don't Tread on Me
(Note: free registration may be required to view the article).
... I'll just read it from the google cache.
No need
Slashdot? Oh, I just read it for the articles.
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.
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.
Google's image search doesn't display advertisments.
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.
So do what everyone else does: use Google to find those sites, then send them cease-and-desist letters and cancel any passwords they list. Don't blame the messenger.