Another Pointless Perfect 10 Suit Gets Shot Down

from the smacked dept

Porn publisher Perfect 10 has been something of a copyright gadfly. It sued Google, arguing that the thumbnail images showed in its Image Search -- of images posted online by other people -- of Perfect 10's copyrighted materials constituted copyright infringement. Despite earlier rulings that linking to images in such a way wasn't infringement, Perfect 10 won an injuction over Google, although another court later overturned it, emphasizing again that thumbnails fall under fair use. But Perfect 10 filed an even sillier suit, targeting companies that processed payments for porn sites it alleged were stealing its images. Again, like in the Google case, the payment companies had nothing to do with the act of copyright infringement, and now an appeals court has upheld a lower court's ruling that bounced the case out of court, nothing that the payment companies, indeed, had not contributed to any copyright infringement. Perfect 10's strategy of suing everybody but the actual copyright infringers looks like it's been resoundly defeated, but somehow it's hard to imagine we've heard the last of the company.
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Filed Under: copyright, lawsuit
Companies: google, perfect 10


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  1. identicon
    Slartibartfast, 9 Jul 2007 @ 7:28pm

    Obviously I'm missing an important point here. Do they have idiots for lawyers? Even if they won such cases what do they hope to achieve? Do they think they will make lots of money from taking people to court? Are they doing it as a tax writeoff? Maybe I simply don't understand the world of big business!

    link to this | view in thread ]

  2. identicon
    Xanius, 9 Jul 2007 @ 8:23pm

    On the contrary...

    They have brilliant lawyers that know how to line their own pockets with hundreds of hours on useless cases.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  3. icon
    Anonymous Poster (profile), 9 Jul 2007 @ 8:35pm

    Re: On the contrary...

    Good point. I wonder if the heads of companies who make these frivolous lawsuits ever think of that.

    What am I saying? Of course they don't.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  4. identicon
    Enrico Suarve, 10 Jul 2007 @ 1:56am

    So how do you market a porn site?

    Pointless? Probably not

    I'm guessing since I'm from the UK but there are usually rules re what is acceptable to advertise in mainstream publications and what isn't

    Again I'm just guessing but titties probably falls into the second list

    Consider the massive marketing budgets some companies have, then consider being all monied up with no place to go...

    So sue a few people, get your name in the papers. Hopefully people will at least see your name and add a .com to the end, at best some may even think that if your thumbnails are so hot they are worth sueing over, then the full screen has to be amazing....

    It's all just advertising and exposure in my opinion

    link to this | view in thread ]

  5. identicon
    Jr, 10 Jul 2007 @ 6:43am

    I agree..

    I know I'm curious to see who these Perfect 10 clowns are now.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  6. icon
    lrobbo (profile), 12 Jun 2012 @ 9:58am

    Perfect clowns most likely.

    link to this | view in thread ]


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