Norman Zada is CEO of Perfect 10, which publishes a print magazine and a subscription-only Web site showing nude photos of models under exclusive contracts. On Wednesday, his lawyers asked a U.S. District Court in Los Angeles to order Google to stop showing images of Perfect 10 models.
Zada sued Google in November 2004, after Google allegedly ailed to respond to 34 notices under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Zada’s beef with Google’s image search was that most results led not to Perfect 10, but to rogue sites that posted unauthorized copies of his images.
Google’s point of view, as expressed in an e-mail provided to internetnews.com, was that he should take his complaint to the offending publishers.
"Google is a provider of information, not a mediator," read the e-mail, signed by "The Google Team." It went on, "Even if we were able to eliminate the offending page from our index, it would still be on the Web. Every few weeks, our robots sweep the Web for content. If the site is still available on the Web when we crawl, we will likely pick it up and add it to our index again."
