Perfect 10 are suing Microsoft Live Search for including stolen images in their search results.
I can understand why Perfect 10 are upset, nobody likes people stealing their content. The problem is that its not up to the search engines to police copyright theft.
The funny part of the article is that Perfect 10 are alleging the MSNBot is clever enough to hack the Perfect 10 site:
The suit also says Microsoft’s MSN search engine can find passwords that have been improperly posted on other websites and enable access to Perfect 10’s website.
Even if MSN had a password stealing spider why can’t Perfect 10 just add a line to htaccess or robots.txt blocking them?
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Leeds based digital & SEO agency Branded3. Patrick also runs Blogstorm.You can get our blog posts delivered for free by email every day - simply add your email address to the box below or alternatively grab the RSS feed.
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{ 11 comments… read them below or add one }
“Microsoft’s MSN search engine can find passwords that have been improperly posted on other websites”
What an idiotic statement! The job of a search bot is to find & index information posted on web sites.
If people are publicly posting passwords or other information on the web, then yes, the MSNbot will find it. That’s what it does. It’s finds information.
This does not mean that Microsoft is ’stealing’ passwords, it’s only reading and indexing publicly posted material.
I’m skeptical that the MSNbot knows how to fill in form fields…
This is retarded. Perfect 10 is leaving their website open to crawlers (see previous digg article on how to fool porn sites into thinking your a web bot). Then when their images are indexed and thumbnailed, they go sue people. Same thing happened to google. I hate being an american.
Screw Live Search – I’d love to get my hands on some of those Perfect 10 pictures!
I think the article is saying MSN Bot can find the password if it is posted elsewhere, and not index it? Still that’s incredibly stupid.
One Man. One Year. $100,000 online. Don’t bother with MSN, it’s password free.
http://www.oneyeargoal.com
It’s trivial for MSNbot (googlebot, etc.) to find links containing passwords. There are entire sites devoted to them! (do a google search for “xxx” and password if you want to find some. Don’t do that at work.)
The links are written in a way (which doesn’t work in IE7 now, btw) so that it puts in the username and password for you, no form needed.
Weren’t Perfect10 the same people who sued Google for having thumbnails of their pictures freely available in Google Images, potentially damaging their chance to sell them to mobile/PDA users?
lol that’s funny, they clearly are just looking for frivolous law suit.
They must have got a nice traffic bump from suing Google. Now they are looking to do it again.
They are so right. The best way to promote your web site is sue the search engine ad make sure you are excluded from all search results. That’s what everyone wants.
I had never heard of perfect tin, so I guess their lawsuit is somewhat successful.
That’s exactly what I meant. It is up to the responsibility of the webmaster to secure their own server, or otherwise their own website.
Should not totally blame MSN bot for these issues.
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