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Google Threatened With $100M Lawsuit Over Nude Celebrity Photos
Dave Knott writes A Los Angeles lawyer representing over a dozen female celebrities, is threatening to sue Google for $100 million US over nude photos leaked online from personal iCloud accounts. The law firm Lavely & Singer accuses the web giant of "accommodating, facilitating and perpetuating" the distribution of the photos when it failed to remove the images from its search results. The stars involved in the law firm's action were not named, but the law firm alleges many of their photos still exist on Google sites like BlogSpot and YouTube four weeks after the firm ordered them taken down.
I have no idea what clients they do or do not have, though I did find it odd that none were mentioned specifically. The writer of the article might be at fault for that, though.
I believe that they're making lots of noise to get Google to settle quietly. Google did respond to their DMCA requests, according to the statement I saw from this lawyer, but they claim this wasn't "fast enough" and other nonsense. Expecting them to police the internet is also nonsense, but they clearly are sharks looking for a payout or they'd go after the people *actually hosting* the images. Those people don't have money, though, so this guy doesn't care. He's trying to make an example and get a payout from what I can see.
You can't copyright scents, or colors. You can't copyright instructions, such as game rules or recipes (though you can copyright some specific presentations of them). You can't copyright anything made without human creative input - no machine writing, no photographs where there's not even the slimmest claim of artistic composition or whatever.
Also, of recent note: monkey selfies have no copyright protection, nor presumably would any other picture taken by monkeys no matter how interesting.
But porn is certainly covered. There was a huge wave of porn-related copyright trolls recently.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
FYI, here is Google's actual response:
"We've removed tens of thousands of pictures, within hours of the requests being made, and we have closed hundreds of accounts. The Internet is used for many good things. Stealing people's private photos is not one of them."
The way google has behaved in the past 24 months that post doesn't seem to be untrue to me, they certainly seem to think they are king of the internet.