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.

Comments

Makes Sense

[l0ungeb0y]

These photos were leaked on the Internet, and Google is like King of the Internet and can control and censor every last thing that happens on it.

Re:Makes Sense

[Tablizer]

The flip side is the rights of say Blogger users. If I post photo X as a blogger user, it should be up to me to decide if I want to take it down or not, not Google (except maybe in extreme cases, of which this doesn't seem to fall into).

The Blogger user (poster) should be the legal entity responsible for a given blog's content, not Google. Sue the Blogger user if you don't like their content, not Google.

Re:Makes Sense

[SeaFox]

These photos were leaked on the Internet, and Google is like King of the Internet and can control and censor every last thing that happens on it.

This is more true than it should be. There's a whole generation of people using the Internet who literally don't know how to browse to a website directly. They don't know how an address bar works, and go to google to look up whatever they want. Even when they have the URL.. That's like going to a reverse phone book to look up a person by their number -- to find out how to call them..

The biggest problem (that is often ignored) is you're now putting control over your access to the Internet in Google's hands by doing this. If Google doesn't want you to visit a website for business reasons, or political reasons, all they have to do is remove the sites from their search index. Unless you know how to actually browse to the site or think of looking on a search engine other than your usual, you're effectively blocked from it.

For these people Google does, in practice, have the ability to censor the Internet.
And browser makers increasing trend to monkeying with the address bar's function only makes it worse.

Re:Makes Sense

[budgenator]

These photos were leaked on the Internet, and Google is like King of the Internet and can control and censor every last thing that happens on it.

These "Celebrities" should be very careful what they ask for, imagine if the URL to every photo, and every article written about them just fell into the great bitbucket; if you don't nuke'em from orbit, you'll never be sure.

Re:Makes Sense

[sir1real]

They're suing Google because that's where the money is. Random bloggers don't have 100 million dollars.

Re:Makes Sense

[nitehawk214]

But if I do something illegal, you don't go and sue the nearest bank just because they have money. You sue the person responsible.

Claiming Google is responsible for all of the content posted on the entire internet is stupid.

Re:Makes Sense

[TheRaven64]

The problem with suing people who have lots of money is that they can afford good lawyers - and it shouldn't take a very good lawyer to get something this stupid thrown out of court. Typically when people do this, they want to have an out-of-court settlement, where Google agrees to pay $1 (cheaper than a few minutes of lawyer time) and neither side is allowed to disclose the terms of the settlement. They can then go to the next company and say 'Google didn't feel able to fight this in court and agreed to a settlement where they paid us compensation, you have less money to spend on lawyers than them, so you should pay us compensation too'.

A big part of IBM's legal policy of millions for defence, not one dollar for tribute, is that they used to be the company that everyone went to for this kind of (not legally binding, but useful for marketing) precedent. Once you get a reputation for fighting every case and countersuing if you win, then fewer trolls bother you...

In other news

[ihtoit]

Ford sued by families of hit-n-run victims, Colt sued by families of suicide-by-cops, and McDonald's sued for making kids obese.

Stupid move, celebrity

[jdastrup]

Considering celebrities are often all about their image, this isn't going to make them look good. First of all, it's stupid. It's almost biting the hand that feeds them. They gain popularity through Google, and now they want to sue Google? And it's obviously not Google's fault, so they look stupid. Also makes them look like they are out just for the money. Really stupid move.

Re:Girls

[umafuckit]

Dude, they're not suing for sales lost on their cum shot photos.

Suspicious law firm?

[pkinetics]

Claim to be filling on behalf of "celebs" in hopes of actually drawing celebs to actually sign up. Throw a number so large out there the celebs will think "Hey, I can benefit from this."

Law firm may not have even a single client yet. Threatening to sue is not the same as actually filling.

Re:Suspicious law firm?

[rahvin112]

Real Celebrities don't do anything. They call their agent (actually they have their assistant call their agent). The agent or their staff generally has a few brain cells to rub together and does something sensible then tells the celebrity they did something about it and the issue goes away because the celebrity has the attention span of a hyperactive 2 year old who just ate a pound of candy.

Occasionally the celebrity is a primadonna or insists on doing things themselves or forces their agent to do something the agent advised against. Those cases usually end up being like when Streisand tried to have pictures of her home removed from the internet and coined an entire phrase for what happens when you try to use a court to censor the internet (namely the Streisand effect). Usually after doing something like this a couple times the celebrity learns to trust that their agent is smarter than them and starts listening to them and then they become like the rest of the celebrities.

As you said, lawyers who run around tossing around 100 million dollar figures and talk about suing Google (who has the money to drag the case out for a decade, just for spite) don't actually represent real celebrities, though they may represent some hack. Lawyers that represent real celebrities are hired by the agent and are totally professional. They'll send nice nonthreatening letters and ask to meet with the Google executives. Being the smooth talking devils they are they will likely convince Google's execs to do something even if it's nothing that will affect it. They will then bill the celebrity about $100K and say they did all that's legally possible and if the celebrity wants to do more they need a million dollar retainer and a contract and that they'll probably lose the case and cause a ton of bad publicity (which the Agent will tell them is totally stupid).

Why not Apple?

[hilather]

I'm pretty sure there is more of a case to be made in pointing the finger at the company that had the weak security controls which allowed this breach to happen. Just sayin...

In other news

[Anonymous Coward]

Are those actual news items or made up? ...

I can't tell any more.

We understand

[Charliemopps]

The response from Google:

"We understand your concern and want to help! Unfortunately due to the technical limitations of... well... reality, we cannot eliminate these photos from existence. But still, we refuse to take part in this invations of your privacy and after much diligence we think we've found a solution to this problem. Hereafter searching for the names of any person found in this lawsuit will result in nothing. The term "Jennifer Lawrence" will be ignored in all searches hereafter as well as every other actress named in this suit. Thank you and happy Googling!"

 

Hardly

[s.petry]

Google removed the pictures every time they received a take down notice, and continues to do so when people create new accounts and upload new copies. What is not being removed are news stories (including blogger reports) that _show_ some of these images in redacted form.

This claim is to make money and promote people, not about any real harm. A secondary effect is to get back to promoting internet censorship. I'm guessing that the same scum involved in framing 4chan to promote internet censorship is involved here somewhere. If this case ever makes it to court the prosecution should be laughed away and have to pay Google's legal expenses.