Perfect 10 sued Google in November of 2004. It says that Google
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."
Perfect 10 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.
The publisher contends that it has sent 35 notices of
infringement to Google covering over 6,500 infringing URLs, but
that Google continues to display over 3,000 Perfect 10 copyrighted
images without authorization.
According to Dr. Norm Zada, the founder of Perfect 10 Magazine
and a former Stanford, UCLA, and Columbia University professor and
IBM Computer Science Research Staff Member, who began publishing
Perfect 10 Magazine in 1997, most of the traffic to search engines
is sex-related.
"Overture's Key Selector Tool indicates that most searches on
the internet are sex-related," says Zada. "Google's extraordinary
gain in market cap from nothing a few years ago to close to eighty
billion dollars, is more due to their massive misappropriation of
intellectual property than anything else," says Zada.
According to Perfect 10, Google will likely argue that because
it provides a "search function," it should be excused from
liability for copyright infringement. From Perfect 10's standpoint,
Google isn't directing people where to find Perfect 10 images –
that would be Perfect 10 Magazine and perfect10.com – rather, it is
displaying Perfect 10 images and allowing users to download Perfect
10 images itself. To the extent that Google does direct users
searching for Perfect 10 pictures anywhere, "it is virtually always
to a website which misappropriated those images, not to
perfect10.com."
Zada continued: "Google is currently displaying over 3,000
Perfect 10 copyrighted images and linking them to websites
containing numerous other Perfect 10 copyrighted images and in many
cases ads for which Google earns revenue."
"Google is no longer a legitimate search engine," he said. "It
is a commercial advertising operation determined to increase ad
revenue regardless of what rights it tramples on in the
process."
"In some cases, as many as 96% of Google search results on
Perfect 10 model names go not to Perfect10.com, but to infringing
Google AdSense partners of which Google has received notice," says
Zada. "That's not legitimate search."
Any website publisher can sign up for Google AdSense. It's an
easy way for publishers to display Google ads – those being paid
for by its AdWords customers – on their content pages. AdWords
customers pay Google and Google pays a commission to AdSense
publishers. So Google can maximise its revenues by maximising the
traffic that it sends to AdSense affiliates. Perfect 10 does not
suggest that Google is weighting its search results in favour of
AdSense-supported sites; but it does argue that Google profits
directly from the popularity of porn, and its particular concern is
that it profits from Perfect 10's porn that has been stolen by
others.
Zada believes that the outcome of Perfect 10's motion for
preliminary injunction should have a major impact not only on
Perfect 10, but also on traditional media outlets which are losing
the ad revenue war to search engines, in part because of all the
nude and semi-nude images search engines offer for free.
Right now, he says, consumers who want to view a nude scene
involving Halle Berry, Nicole Kidman, or other Hollywood beauties,
can view that scene for free by visiting a search engine without
purchasing the DVD. "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," says Zada.
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