A popular singles site that promises “Love is complicated, Match.com is simple” is taking issue with a website that claims “Love is complicated, sex is simple.”

In a trademark suit filed in Virginia federal court, Match claims the adult matchmaker has no right to use the names “xxxmatch.com” or “eroticmatch.com.”

Texas-based Match claims it is the biggest site in the world for dating and relationships and that “consumers are likely to be confused or misled into believing” that the adult sites are related to Match.

The xxxmatch.com features a scantily clad woman who invites users choose from a variety of categories like “Man” or “lesbian couple.”

Match is asking for a court order forbidding the use of “xxxmatch” or the slogan “Love is complicated, sex is simple.” Match also wants the defendants, who are based in California and the Caribbean, to turn over their profits.

Match.com launched in 1995 and claims to have signed up 15 million members since then.

Here’s  a copy of the complaint:

Match vs. XXXmatch
 

This time, the reluctant dating site star is a Slate contributor who teases us with the headline, “I found my boyfriend’s face on a dating website!”

The story, alas, is less tawdry than we hoped — it turns out both the boyfriend and the writer herself had let a friend sell pics of them to a stock photo agency.

The agency in turn sold the photos to dating site HowAboutWe and, voila, minor internet scandal.

The lesson here seems to be don’t volunteer for stock photos and you won’t end up on the internet. As the writer discovered, model release contracts are fairly bulletproof so there’s not much she and her boyfriend can do.

The story does, though, provide a fun tour of other unexpected photo finds — including a man “who cried when he saw that his leg had been digitally chopped off for a billboard about the dangers of diabetes.”

This story, as reported by Courthouse News, started innocently enough when Lattimore allowed a photographer named Roger Kirby to snap her picture when she was her getting her hair cut in a salon in 2008. Kirby was being paid to take photos of the salon. Before long, though, Kirby’s photograph of Lattimore began appearing in unexpected places like Match.com and the sexuality section of website HealthCentral. Lattimore claims she was embarrassed after friends told her husband that her image was on the dating site and after she learned that her photo accompanied an article on homosexuality called “Come Out, Come Out Wherever You Are.”

Lattimore says she is not gay and has never been a member of Match.com. A Facebook page for a person from Savannah with her name depicts a young blonde woman and a man.

So how did Lattimore come to be the unwitting face of internet singles and closeted gays? It turns out that Kirby’s photograph was uploaded to a gallery of stock photos owned by Getty, a company that supplies images for third parties. Ordinarily, such photos are provided with terms that ensure third parties have the right to use them, but something appears to have gone very wrong in this case. Lattimore says she never consented to public use of her image, which was nonetheless downloaded 6,900 times.

Lattimore is suing Kirby, Match.com and HealthCentral for defamation and for misappropriation of likeness. (Getty is not named as a defendant in the suit because it included a disclaimer saying not for commercial use and a user-beware warning.) A right-to-likeness claim typically involves using someone’s name or image without permission in a commercial context, and so this would appear to be a slam-dunk for Ms. Lattimore. As for defamation, she would ordinarily have to show that her reputation has been been harmed by an untrue allegation. But being called “unchaste” is one of four types of statements considered automatically defamatory so Ms. Lattimore may try to argue that Match.com falsely called her chastity into question when it depicted her as one of its models.

Match.com complaint

The lawsuit also alleges that “well over half” of the profiles on Match.com belong to either inactive members or are “fake and fraudulent profiles posted by scammers and others.” That belies Match’s claim to have “millions” of members, the suit states. It also alleges that Match doesn’t do anything to clean up those profiles, which remain on the system and searchable by members for “months and sometimes years” after members stop using the site.

It includes allegations from former Match employees, one of whom stated that in 2006-07, membes were able to hide their profiles to “inactive” or “hidden.” But in 2008, Match changed its policy, only allowing corporate employees to block a profile from view.

A Match spokeswoman responded to my inquiry with a statement saying the claims have no merit and Match will defend itself. She also noted that “similar claims were dismissed by a federal judge in Dallas last Fall.”

Match.com, which was founded in 1995, is one of the top dating websites by audience. The most recently filed 10-K of Match parent company IAC (NSDQ: IACI) says that the dating network had 1.3 million subscribers at the end of 2009. It has seen these types of lawsuits before. The Dallas Morning News reported this month that the company was sued over similar allegations in both 2005 and 2009; both those lawsuits have been dropped. Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) Personals settled a lawsuit over allegedly fake personals in 2007.

The IAC property is an interesting target for daters fed up with bogus profiles, because last year Match itself actually threatened PlentyOfFish.com and other dating websites, claiming they were pumping up bogus stats.

Christian Rudder of competitor dating site OkCupid, a free site which publishes a blog featuring research on online dating trends, wrote a blog post last year arguing that eHarmony and Match.com both have user bases that are more than 90% inactive profiles.

Match taking over Yahoo’s Personals category is a great idea if you believe that the unit was on life support, being run for 18-24 months as a cash cow to capitalize on traffic till the earlier investment paid back. It is a great idea if you believe Yahoo! should focus on a small set of core businesses and divest of things that are distractions (though, 2 1/2 years out of Yahoo! I have no idea what those core business area [sic]). And it is a great idea if Yahoo’s best plan is to be an aggregator and make $3-4 MM a year in affiliate referrals via partner payouts for customer acquisition rather than manage greater revenue against greater cost. But is i(t) a great idea? Not really, But Yahoo! stopped having great ideas a long time ago.

A year ago, Condé Nast execs tell the WSJ, the deal with IAC (NSDQ: IACI) wouldn’t have gotten a second thought. Even in the depths of the recession, the notion that anything going beyond the pure magazine experience was considered anathema, for fear that it would dilute the brand.

But the significant declines in advertising changed that view, especially as social shopping sites emerged and demonstrated how these add-on services could continue to attract and retain both readers and advertisers. In fact, Glamour was one of the first Condé Nast titles to get into affiliate sales by working with ShopStyle.

Next up, Glamour will begin marketing its own line of jewelry with former IAC unit HSN (NSDQ: HSNI), making it the first magazine to feature its own products on the cable network. The jewelry will be sold on the channel starting in August, and will get a big promotional tie-in with the September issue — along with its first iPad edition — that hits stands that month.

The dispute comes as Match.com’s traffic has been dropping off sharply, according to comScore (NSDQ: SCOR). But Blatt calls those numbers “sort of silly,” noting that Match.com recently purchased Singlesnet, which regularly ranks among the top dating sites by traffic, “for virtually nothing.” (Match.com parent IAC (NSDQ: IACI) never disclosed the purchase price). “ComScore … is really not at all demonstrative of the activity on the site and the success of the site,” he says.

During our chat, I asked Blatt whether Match.com, which in addition to Singlesnet, recently purchased People Media, was still on the look-out for acquisitions. “We’re always looking at things in the industry,” he says. “A lot of it is driven by price. At the end of the day, I think right now we’ve got the field pretty well covered — we’ve got Match which is the core, we’ve got Chemistry, we’ve got the People Media niche sites, which are more demographically targeted. There’s no gaping hole in our portflio, so I don’t think there’s a strategic need to buy anything in particular.”

For the record, Blatt is dismissive of two seemingly obvious holes in Match.com’s portfolio: A free offering and one based on an existing social network. Blatt says free is a “misnomer” since most so-called free sites, including PlentyOfFish, do have paid options. As for a social dating site, like Zoosk, Blatt says it’s a “subscription-based, paid dating site that does exactly what Match does only with far fewer people and not as good tools and features.”

Like Match.com, Singlesnet is a general, subscription-based dating site. It had just over 3 million unique visitors last month. By contrast, Match’s flagship had 5 million.

This is Match’s first acquisition since it bought People Media — the owner of 27 targeted dating sites, including BlackPeopleMeet, SingleParentMeet and SeniorPeopleMeet — for $80 million in July. IAC (NSDQ: IACI) has also expressed an interest in buying Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) Personals but so far nothing has come of that.

Financial terms of this deal are not being released.

Release | Webcast

More on media and advertising: IAC attributes some of the revenue drop to a decline in revenue per query across its proprietary properties, including Ask.com — and, in turn, attributes some of that to a revamp that cut the number of clicks needs for results. At the same time, the cost per click decreased but IAC says the decline slowed down in Q3 compared to the previous quarter. Some of the drop was offset, according to the company, by growth in partners and queries for the Ask toolbar and at Dictionary.com. Expect some more color on advertising during the conference call with IAC Chairman and CEO Barry Diller at 11 a.m.

Citysearch: Results are included in media and advertising but worth a separate look following a relaunch and the acquisition of Urbanspoon. IAC blames a combination of the “difficult display advertising environment” and “transitional issues” (relaunch, integrating an new ad serving platform for Citysearch) for the decline in revenue.

Emerging businesses: Not enough Bottega Veneta ads at The Daily Beast? Revenue from emerging businesses dropped 19 percent to $40.5 million from nearly $50 million in Q308, while the unit lost nearly $9 million. Operating income before amortization dropped 37 percent — in part, because of investments in Beast and 3D gaming startup InstanceAction. The category also includes “our partnership with Ben Silverman,” along with Shoebuy, Pronto.com, CollegeHumor, Vimeo, and Life123.com.

Match: Last year’s numbers included Match Europe; this year’s didn’t following the Q2 sale to Meetic. Acquired in July, PeopleMedia added $6.4 million in revenue but also was affected by the write off of its $3.6 million. Without PeopleMedia and the Match Europe comp, Match revenue was up 5 percent; with those, it was down 13 percent. U.S. subs rose 9 percent.

– Share buyback stalled: IAC bought back an additional half-million shares over the 5.1 million already disclosed but nowhere close to the 21.5 million shares in the stock repurchase authorization. The company says “discussions with a significant shareholder for the repurchase of its shares prevented IAC from repurchasing additional shares. These discussions have been terminated.”

Update: During the earnings call, Diller identified the “significant shareholder” as Liberty, saying the buyback would have been at market value.

People Media earned $11.6 million in 2008 before depreciation and amortization; by comparison, Match.com reported $9.9 million in operating income before amortization during Q109. (Update: For a better comparison, Match reported $91 million in operating income before amortization in 2008.) Fourteen-year-old Match.com had some 5.8 million unique users in May, compared with nearly 4 million for People Media’s combined sites, according to *comScore* Media Metrix. Both have a portal presence: Match.com powers MSN online dating in the U.S> and other countries; People Media does the same for AOL (NYSE: TWX) Personals communities.

You really can’t get more targeted than some of the sites operated by People Media — BlackChristianPeoplemeet.com, for instance. Match.com CEO Greg Blatt explains in the announcement that the combined company will continue to look for ways to play off the interest some people have in dating by demographics. Despite the disparities in the two businesses, Blatt expects to share product development and online marketing expertise and to market “a broader array of services” to the combined customer base. On area that isn’t mentioned: international expansion, which would seem likely given Match.com’s presence across in 24 countries and its investment in European service Meetic.

– IAC has plenty of cash left: IAC Chairman and CEO Barry Diller has said he’s willing to spend on the right properties. The $80 million cash payment for People Media barely makes a dent in the nearly $2 billion on hand. More than enough should he try to follow through on that interest in Yahoo Personals valued at about $500 million.