November 23, 2004

A pornography publisher based in California sued Google for copyright infringement violations Friday, accusing the search engine of failing to remove from its search results pages thousands of photographs posted on the Internet without permission.

In a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, Perfect 10 Inc. alleged that Web surfers can find its copyrighted pictures of nude women for free by performing Google searches.

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The company said it has sent 27 formal requests to the Mountain View, Calif.-based Google to remove the offending Web sites from its index and stop displaying the photographs in its search results, but was not satisfied with Google's response.

"It's very difficult to make money when all of your pictures are given away worldwide for free," said Perfect 10 President Norm Zada.

A Google spokesman declined to comment, saying the company had not yet reviewed the lawsuit.

Perfect 10 is represented by attorney Russell Frackman, who also represented major record companies in their lawsuits against file-sharing networks for copyright infringement.

Federal law places the burden of identifying copyright infringement on the copyright holder. While Google is not compelled to ferret out violations, it is required to respond to violations brought to its attention.

Jonathan Zittrain, co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, said Google has typically responded quickly to remove infringing works from its database.

Google has sometimes been accused of being too aggressive in responding to complaints of digital copyright violations. For example, the search engine company was accused of censorship after, at the request of the Church of Scientology, it removed from its searchable index Web sites criticizing the church.

"Google gets tons of notices and generally listens to them," Zittrain said. "I'd be surprised if they weren't listening to these."

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In an earlier case, Kelly vs. Arriba Soft Corp., the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in 2002 that search engines could not display full-sized images without linking back to the Web site upon which they were posted.

But they could display smaller versions of the images, called thumbnails, without infringing copyrights. Google displays its results in postage-sized images, but links to Web sites that Perfect 10 says illegally display full-sized images.

Source: Detroit Technology News

        

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