Out of sight, out of mind? Not in this case. A snippet of invisible Web page text has prompted a lawsuit by a Belgian company against Women.com Networks Inc. The suit shows how far Web site operators will go to capture and maintain prominent placement in Internet search results.

The Belgian firm, Euregio.net AG, filed suit in Brussels earlier this month alleging that an astrology site owned by Women.com, a Web site for female Web surfers, had infringed its copyright and engaged in unfair competition. Euregio.net said it had discovered that a paragraph of text from EasyScopes.com, its directory of horoscope sites, had been reproduced almost verbatim on all of the pages of InternetHoroscopes.com. But as the copied text was reproduced in white letters on a white background, it was invisible to the casual surfer.
So why publish something nobody can read? Euregio.net says the offending paragraph and its many horoscope-related keywords were there solely to push the site higher in search engine results, thus boosting traffic.

"It was really to trick the search engine, and to try to get the people who would normally be interested in the information on our site, to try to get them on their site," said Hubert Savelberg, chief executive of Euregio.net.

Women.com removed the copied text after Euregio.net pointed it out last month, but did not respond to a request for monetary compensation and a published acknowledgement of the copying, Euregio.net said. The suit seeks one million euros ($860,000) in damages. Until this week the InternetHoroscopes pages with the copied text, complete with Euregio.net's spelling mistakes, were still available from the Google search engine, which keeps slightly out-of-date copies of sites in its cache.

Carl Fischer, vice president for corporate communications at iVillage Inc. which completed an acquisition of Women.com this month, said he could not talk about the specifics of the suit. "We believe the suit is without merit, and we plan on vigorously defending ourselves," he said.

But Savelberg said iVillage officials seemed "more willing to have a dialogue" than Women.com's management, and that lawyers for the two companies had spoken by phone on Thursday. No agreement had been reached yet, he said.

There have been a number of lawsuits involving hidden text in Web pages. But Danny Sullivan, editor of the Search Engine Watch site, noted that most of these have focused on the misuse of trademarks in so-called meta tags, which are part of the underlying HTML code of the page and can include keywords for use by search engines. For example, Playboy has had a lengthy legal battle with Terri Welles, its 1981 Playmate of the Year, over her right to use the word "playboy" in the meta tags of her own site.

The horoscope dispute "is an evolution beyond that" because it deals with copyright infringement, said Sullivan, who served as an expert witness on behalf of Welles in the Playboy dispute. He said the only similar case was a 1999 crackdown by the Federal Trade Commission on pagejacking, a sophisticated trick in which search engines are fed a page copied from a popular site while Web surfers are shown something entirely different. The InternetHoroscopes copying was "a relatively low-tech thing" by comparison, Sullivan said.

From a legal perspective, the high-tech twist in this dispute is that no humans were likely to read the allegedly infringing material. Traditionally, copyright infringement involves some sort of publication, said Richard Raysman, a partner at the New York firm of Brown Raysman Millstein Felder & Steiner who specializes in technology law. It could be argued, he said, that "if it's invisible, then it's not a publication."
However, Raysman said, "if someone's actually copied this and included the typos, and at some point it's accessible to another entity, even though it's invisible to humans, I think the court would come down on the side of the Belgian company."

Savelberg said his company discovered the copying after puzzling over InternetHoroscopes' appearance in certain search results. A look at the site's HTML code revealed the copied text, with "Internet Horoscopes" inserted wherever "EasyScopes" had been.

Savelberg said Euregio.net has always tried to maximize its sites' appeal to search engines, which rank results based on several factors including the presence of keywords. The company's efforts seem to be paying off. Search results for "horoscopes" on leading search engines like Excite and Google feature EasyScopes near the top of the page. On Thursday, EasyScopes was the fourth site listed on Google, while InternetHoroscopes was a lowly 29th.