The search engine giant claims it's not at fault

Oct 3, 2014 07:44 GMT  ·  By
Google tells lawyers that it not only removed their offending material but thousands of other pictures in the Celebgate scandal
   Google tells lawyers that it not only removed their offending material but thousands of other pictures in the Celebgate scandal

The legal machinations of the Celebgate scandal have begun in earnest. Several female celebrities have partnered up and their lawyer, Marty Singer, is taking the first steps in resolving the matter with what he's hoping will be a hefty settlement.

Yesterday, Page Six revealed that the lawyer had fired off a “strongly-worded” letter to Google, blaming the company for taking advantage of the leak, and failing to remove thousands of links from its sites BlogSpot YouTube, thus making hundreds of millions in “advertising revenue.”

The lawyer went on to threaten Google with a $100 million (€799 millon) lawsuit, as damages for “profiting from the victimization of women.” Today, a representative from Google gave the official response and it's basically a case of denying everything said in the legal letter.

Google confirms it not only deleted material pointed out by lawyers but also thousands of other pictures

The response claims Google “We’ve removed tens of thousands of pictures — within hours of the requests being made — and we have closed hundreds of accounts. The internet is used for many good things. Stealing people’s private photos is not one of them.”

This position comes to contradict the allegations in the letter that Google has failed to remove material the lawyers had pointed out existed on its affiliated websites. The giant maintains that it not only has removed all links the lawyers had provided, but also took their efforts further and removed many others which had the same material published.

There is not really anything more Google can do in the scandal

For anyone with a faint notion of how the internet works, the idea of completely removing such material from the online medium is ludicrous. Since there is no “internet police,” the materials can be re-uploaded somewhere else as quickly as they are taken down from one place. Thinking that you can somehow control this phenomenon is a pipe dream.

Marty Singer is a lawyer for several of the celebrities involved in the Celebgate scandal, such as Jennifer Lawrence (arguably one of the worst hit by the scandal), Kate Upton, Kirsten Dunst and many others.

The FBI investigation into the source of the leaks has not found anything yet

It must be said that the FBI was alerted at the time the leaks came out and has since launched an investigation, but details as to the progress of said investigation are scarce. This has led the media to believe that progress is slow and the FBI is no closer to identifying the source of the leak, despite the fact there have already been two waves of leaks, and more are expected to come.