Porn-Jacking Crackdown

The FTC today announced a crackdown on pornjacking, errr, pagejacking. Apparently these smooth operators have been copying other sites wholesale in order to get hits on certain keyword combinations - search engine fodder. And then of course when you click through from the search engine, you are whisked away with Javascript into porn land, never to return... It seems that the actual offenders were Australian so international cooperation was required. Hmmm, here's a couple of readers submitting a New York Times story too, it's a little more in-depth.

We can probably assume there were assorted copyright violations involved; but when does this rise to the level of consumer fraud? Using dictionaries to get search engine hits is a stupid practice, one that the search engines are right to minimize, but if it starts being regarded as some sort of legally-actionable fraud, a lot of people are going to be in trouble - and there's a lot of potential side-effects (see the various lawsuits that have been filed about people using certain keywords in their META tags, such as Playboy suing a former Playmate who used "Playmate" in her tags: Playboy lost). Where's the line? -- michael

Comments

Wha?

[sporty]

(humour) So let me get this straight, it's a bad thing when porn sites imitate regular sites, but why is it when I ask for porn, I get this...

http://www.google.com/linux?q=porn&num=10