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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.
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
Then the suit should be filed against the websites illegally serving their copyrighted images, not Google.
I do things for money that I wouldn't ordinarily do. It's called "gainful employment".
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
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.
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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
Carpe Diem
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.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
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.
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."
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