Perfect 10 Claiming That Passing Along Its DMCA Notices Is, Itself, Infringing
from the shaping-case-law-day-by-day dept
Perfect 10 is a company that, for a brief period of time, apparently published a rather expensive porn magazine. Since then, it seems to have served a single purpose: to file ridiculous copyright lawsuits that it almost always loses, but which have helped to define case law concerning copyright issues. Various Perfect 10 decisions are frequently cited in copyright lawsuits -- for example, its multiple losses concerning claims that search engines showing thumbnails infringe on copyrights. Earlier this year, Rapidshare filed a very entertaining countersuit against Perfect 10, which goes into great detail suggesting that the company serves little purpose other than being something of a copyright troll. In fact, it seems to go out of its way to not use tools provided to take down infringing content, and to alert internet service providers of potential infringement in ways that are almost impossible for them to do anything about. For example, it's famous for filing deficient DMCA notices that do not properly indicate where the specific content is located.The "company" (and I say that loosely) is apparently back in court with Google yet again, this time arguing that passing on its DMCA takedown notices to sites like ChillingEffects.org is also copyright infringement. Yes, it's saying that publishing a DMCA notice can constitute infringement. ChillingEffects, of course, is the enormously helpful website that acts as a repository for DMCA takedown notices. It serves as an amazingly useful tool. Perfect10's argument is that it includes its images in the DMCA notices, so publishing them via ChillingEffects is infringement. It seems to stretch any level of believability to think that a DMCA notice which Perfect10 itself filed is acting as a reasonble replacement for the content contained within. Besides, I'm pretty sure that there is no reason for Perfect 10 to include the actual images -- it could just send URLs. It seems like the only reason to include the actual images is to be able to make a bogus copyright claim at a later date, which is exactly what happened.
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Filed Under: copyright, dmca notices
Companies: google, perfect 10
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Special Purpose
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I am not a lawyer, I don't have an answer. I just have a problem where any and all documents can be shuffled off to a third party and publicly posted. I wonder if Google does this with all of their business correspondence.
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Free Pr0n
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Re: Free Pr0n
Imagine that.
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Hold on I'm looking at some *hot* DMCA takedown notices right now...
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Regardless of that, I think Google's passing along the images to Chilling Effects is prima facie infringement. However, given Chilling Effect's transformative use of the material for scholarly research, I think it's fair use.
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Go read the RapidShare lawsuit. It makes it pretty clear that Perfect 10 is not at all *worried* about infringement -- they *want* infringement so they can sue.
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Perfect 10's point is legit...
People need to understand that Chilling Effects is there to threaten you! The message is “don’t you dare tell Google to take something down because we will put it right back up AND draw attention to it!”
Overall I love Google and the freedom of the Internet, but Norm Zada is right on this Chilling Effects thing. If you don’t agree just wait until it is YOU who is in desperate need of having something removed (legally) from the Internet and Chilling Effects laughs in your face and says “just for that we are going to double publish the information!”
There needs to be a way that when the law says “take it down” it ACTUALLY COMES DOWN!
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Re: Perfect 10's point is legit...
There is (for copyright). It's called the DMCA, and you send it to the source of the material and they take it down.
The problem with sending stuff to Google is that Google just links to other sources. Send it to the source.
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