Mediatakeout.com had no right to use the images of Banks, who posed in knee-high red leather boots and a leopard-print leotard with her caboose pointed at the camera, the skin mag claims in a United States federal court copyright-infringement suit.
Playboy says it has exclusive rights to the saucy copyrighted pictures, which appeared in its pages in April.
In the snaps, the Harlem-born Banks, 24, cavorts with two black cats against a pink backdrop.
Mediatakeout.com even plastered its own watermark on the images, Playboy charges.
In February, the magazine issued a statement describing the shoot by veteran fashion photographer and director Ellen von Unwerth as a “nude pictorial” and a “frisky pictorial that’s sure to break the Internet.”
Banks appears topless, draped in a couple of cats, in the images which ran alongside a tell-all interview in which she complained about living in the United States.
Banks posted images from the shoot on Instagram.
“I hate everything about this country,” she told the magazine.
“Like, I hate fat white Americans. All the people who are crunched into the middle of America, the real fat and meat of America, are these racist conservative white people who live on their farms. Those little teenage girls who work at Kmart and have a racist grandma — that’s really America.”
Playboy is seeking $150,000 damages from Mediatakeout.com for each photo, according to court papers filed in Manhattan last week.
Mediatakeout.com, which bills itself as “The Most Visited Urban Website in the World,” did not respond to a New York Post message seeking comment.
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