Porn Publisher Mistakenly Goes After Google Again

from the wrong-target... dept

A publisher of adult magazines is making some news today for asking the court to bar Google from displaying certain images they own the copyright to. This is a followup to the case they filed last year and a similar case they've filed against Amazon. However, it's the wrong target. They're going after Google (and Amazon) because they have money -- but they're not the ones infringing on the publisher's copyright. The lawsuit is because some other porn websites have copied photos that are owned by this publisher and posted them to the web for free. Google and Amazon's A9 (and just about any other image search engine) are indexing these sites and so the images show up on certain searches. The people who are infringing are the sites who have posted the photos -- but they don't have money, so the publisher is just suing Google and Amazon and demanding they not show these photos at all. That's pretty difficult as it's not like someone at these companies reviews all the photos their crawler finds before they show up in the index. Besides, if the publisher wins this case, it immediately opens up a new business model for sneaky publishers: (1) just get others to copy your content (2) sue Google/Amazon/Yahoo/Microsoft (3) profit!

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