Idiot: Google stole my porn

Apparently Perfect 10's copyright infringement suit against Amazon didn't generate the publicity it had hoped for, because now the skin mag has filed suit against Google as well. On Wednesday, Perfect 10 asked a U.S. District Court in Los Angeles to enjoin Google from displaying pictures and links to the company's copyrighted photos. Perfect 10 objects to Google search results displaying thumbnails of its photos, along with the links to third-party sites offering larger versions. The pictures are copyrighted, and nearly all the sites indexed by Google are displaying them without permission. "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," said Dr. Norm Zada, a former IBM computer science research staff member who founded Perfect 10 after stumbling upon his true calling in 1997. "That's not legitimate search."

That's not legitimate search? Please. What about the legitimacy of suing a third party for not enforcing your copyrights? Perfect 10 should be pursuing the Web sites that have allegedly stolen its nudie photos, not the search companies that indexed them. But wait, Zada's not done yet. "Google's extraordinary gain in market cap from nothing a few years ago to close to $80 billion is more due to their massive misappropriation of intellectual property than anything else," says Zada. "Google is currently displaying over 3,000 Perfect 10 copyrighted images and linking them to Web sites 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. It is a commercial advertising operation determined to increase ad revenue regardless of what rights it tramples on in the process." Zada went on to predict a dire future for all copyright content. "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." Unbelievable. I'm sure they won't do this, but if I were Google, I'd remove Perfect 10 from its index entirely and see how Zada feels when his new registrations plunge.

-Good Morning Silicon Valley