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

What a buffoon

[Penguinshit]

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

[Chembryl]

Show us the pictures and we will decide!

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. :)

Re:What a buffoon

[Secret Agent X23]

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.

I hope that

[Peyna]

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.

"Allure of naked women"

[WhiteBandit]

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.

Sounds more like a ploy...

[DaNasty]

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

Re:It's not Google's fault.

[NanoGator]

"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

You bastard!

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

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.