Adult magazine publisher Perfect 10 is seeking a preliminary injunction against Google to stop the search giant from allegedly displaying copyright images of its models. Perfect 10, in a filing with the US District Court in Los Angeles, asked the court to immediately halt Google from allegedly copying, displaying and distributing more than 3,000 Perfect 10 photos.
Google is directly infringing on our copyrights. They are copying and showing our work on their Web site, said Norm Zada, Perfect 10 founder. They are also placing ads on these Web sites that are infringing on our work.
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. The company then sent notices to Google, under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, asking the search giant to discontinue linking to the other sites.
The magazine said it had already filed a complaint against Google in November 2004, claiming the web giant is displaying hundreds of thousands of adult images, from the most tame to the most exceedingly explicit, to draw massive traffic to its website, which it is converting into hundreds of millions of dollars of advertising revenue".
Google’s extraordinary gain in market cap from nothing a few years ago to close to $US80 billion is more due to their massive misappropriation of intellectual property than anything else, he said.
Much of Google’s revenues come from searches that link advertisers to users by their search criteria.
The magazine claims that under the guise of being a ‘search engine’, Google is displaying, free of charge, thousands of copies of the best images from Perfect 10, Playboy, nude scenes from major movies, nude images of supermodels, as well as extremely explicit images of all kinds.
Mr Zada said the outcome of the Perfect 10 suit had implications for other media, which he said lost revenues to Google through the same practices.
If all an infringer needs to avoid liability is to provide some sort of a ‘search function’, that will be the end of intellectual property in this country, Mr Zada said.
Perfect 10’s lawsuit against Google is similar to one it filed against Amazon.com in July. In that suit, Perfect 10 makes similar allegations against Amazon’s A9 search engine.
News agency AFP has also sued Google for copyright infringement, claiming the search engine was displaying its news and photos without permission.
In June, the US Supreme Court weighed in on the issue of copyright infringement. The court ruled that companies that are created with the intent of encouraging copyright infringement should be held liable for their customers’ illegal actions.
Within days of the court’s ruling, Google found that people had uploaded and watched copyright content such as the movie "Matrix" via its new video search tool. The search company quickly removed much of the full-length studio and television content.