Adult publisher Perfect 10 has always been in the red,...
Adult publisher Perfect 10 has always been in the red, so it’s not clear why a sought injunction against Google for facilitating copyright infringement would help it now, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in an opinion Wednesday.…
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The owner of the now-defunct magazine Perfect 10 offers a paid-subscription website, perfect10.com, where subscribers can view copyrighted images of nude models for a monthly fee. Perfect 10 argued that Google’s Web search, image search, Blogger service and practice of forwarding image takedown notices to chillingeffects.com, an educational project run by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, unlawfully infringed on Perfect 10’s copyrights. But the appeals court rejected Perfect 10’s arguments that there was a causal relation between Google’s business and irreparable harm to Perfect 10. The appeals court also agreed with the district court’s decision that the company would not suffer irreparable harm in the absence of its request for injunctive preliminary relief. “While being forced into bankruptcy qualifies as a form of irreparable harm … Perfect 10 has not established that the requested injunction would forestall that fate,” said Judge Sandra Ikuta, who wrote the opinion for the three-judge panel. “To begin with, Perfect 10 has not alleged that it was ever in sound financial shape.” Norman Zada, Perfect 10’s founder, claimed that the amount of Perfect 10 thumbnails available on Google increased significantly from 2005 to 2010, and during 1996 to 2007 the company’s revenue declined from $2 million per year to $150,000 per year. But Zada “acknowledges that the company ‘los[t] money at the beginning’ and has never made up that ground during its 15 years of operation,” Ikuta wrote. “Dr. Zada also acknowledges that search engines other than Google contribute to making Perfect 10 images freely available.”