Microsoft Sued over Dirty Search Thumbnails

A porn publisher alleges Microsoft has infringed on its intellectual property by displaying thumbnails of stolen images and linking to pages that host full-size stolen content.

Search engines rarely take the flak for the materials they dredge up, but the founder and publisher of Perfect 10, a pornographic magazine, is suing Microsoft for turning up links to sites that steal the magazine’s intellectual property. Norm Zada filed his claim against the software goliath on Wednesday in U.S. District Court for Central California.

At issue are thumbnails churned up by Microsoft’s image search. Since the company’s search engine automatically indexes pages and displays thumbnails of the images hosted on them, some links to pirated photos owned by Perfect 10 crop up in MSN searches. The thumbnails link to other Web sites where the full-size images are displayed without authorization from Perfect 10.

Zada claims this amounts to copyright infringement. “Microsoft is showing tens of thousands of extremely valuable celebrity images, along with Perfect 10 images, without authorization, which it obtains from hundreds if not thousands of pirate websites,” he said.

Perfect 10 has already wrangled with Google over the same issue. In 2004, Zada sued Google over the thumbnails its image search turned up. A U.S. District Court originally sided with Perfect 10, but a U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit overturned the decision.