Adult magazine Perfect 10 filed a copyright lawsuit against Amazon's A9.com search engine, but a search marketing expert is questioning the case's validity.
In the complaint filed in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles late last month, Perfect 10, Beverly Hills, CA, has asked for a preliminary injunction to stop A9 from displaying Perfect 10's copyrighted images, including photos of nude women.
Perfect 10, which operates www.Perfect10.com, filed a similar suit against Google in November and says both search engines still display more than 2,500 copies of Perfect 10's copyrighted images, along with those from many other sources.
“Search engines such as A9.com and Google are displaying hundreds of thousands of adult images, from the most tame to the most exceedingly explicit, to draw massive traffic to their Web sites, which they convert into ad revenue or sales revenue,” according to a statement from Perfect 10.
Google links Perfect 10's photos to Web sites that have “misappropriated those images” and to ads that Google receives revenue from, instead of to www.perfect10.com, Perfect 10 said.
However, Kevin Lee, founder of search marketing firm Did-it.com, New York, noted that Perfect 10 can simply opt out of having its images included in the results of Google, A9 and any other engine by “following the commonly accepted robot exclusion standard.”
“Ironically, many of Perfect 10's competitors use the fact that spiders crawl images as a method of organic search engine optimization … to drive free traffic to the sites,” Lee said. “So, while most adult sites want the free traffic and visibility, it appears Perfect 10 wants the opposite, or perhaps they just like to litigate things that also result in good PR and media coverage.”
In its statement about the lawsuit, Perfect 10 took the opportunity to criticize pornography in search results.
“Under the guise of being 'search engines,' Amazon and Google now display, free of charge, thousands of copies of the best images from Perfect 10, Playboy, nude scenes from movies … as well as … thousands of images of animals having sex with humans,” Perfect 10 said.
Also, Perfect 10 founder Norm Zada claimed Google's significant gain in market share in recent years stems mainly from its “massive misappropriation of intellectual property.”
Amazon and Perfect 10 did not return calls and e-mails for comment.
Christine Blank covers online marketing and advertising, including e-mail marketing and paid search, for DM News and DMNews.com. To keep up with the latest developments in these areas, subscribe to our daily and weekly e-mail newsletters by visiting www.dmnews.com/newsletters
Christine Blank covers online marketing and advertising, including e-mail marketing and paid search, for DM News and DMNews.com. To keep up with the latest developments in these areas, subscribe to our daily and weekly e-mail newsletters by visiting www.dmnews.com/newsletters
