Canadian Court Lets Perfect 10 Case Against Google Move Forward

Copyright

from the oh-come-on dept

Over the years, we’ve written many, many, many times about Perfect 10, the former publisher of a porn magazine who has spent the last decade making ridiculously laughable arguments about how every search engine on the planet is infringing on its copyrights for pointing people to images that people had scanned from Perfect 10’s magazines and put online. For the most part, these lawsuits have gone nowhere, but Perfect 10 is incredibly persistent. Last month, we wrote about a countersuit by Rapidshare, which detailed how Perfect 10 is now a “copyright troll,” that (according to Rapidshare’s claims) purposely tries to spread its works online in order to have more companies to sue. Obviously, a key target of Perfect 10 has been Google, though Perfect 10 keeps losing (and then continues to come up with ridiculous reasons to keep the lawsuit alive).

Apparently, Perfect 10 has decided that if the US courts won’t work for this game, it might as well try elsewhere. An anonymous reader points us to the news that Perfect 10 is happily suing Google in Canada as well as the US. Google had, quite reasonably, sought to have the case dumped, noting the identical case going on in the US. However, the judge noted that, due to differences in copyright law between the US and Canada, the two lawsuits are not the same. Still, hopefully, a court will see through the ruse.

The press release from Perfect 10 also tries to distinguish its lawsuits from the recent Viacom ruling saying that Google is protected by the DMCA. And while there are differences in the case, Perfect 10’s claims here are laughable:

“This case is inherently different from the Viacom v. Google case, where the Judge apparently felt that Google expeditiously processed Viacom’s notices. Our experience with Google is that Google processes almost no notices from small companies,” Zada adds. “I have sent more than 500 notices of infringement to Google,” Zada said. “I basically do a Google Image search, cross off the images Perfect 10 does not own, and send an Adobe copy of that Google web page to Google, with the infringing images clearly marked. Google can clearly see which images are infringing and where they are located. Yet Google has refused to process those notices,” Zada says.

That’s both silly and misleading. We’ve seen Google pull down content on legitimately filed DMCA notices in a timely manner from companies big and small all the time. In fact, some of us feel that Google is often too quick to pull down content on DMCA notices. The problem, as was pointed out in the Rapidshare lawsuit, is that Perfect 10 refuses to follow the procedure put forth by the DMCA. There’s a clear procedure for how to file a DMCA notice. But what’s clear from the quote above is that Perfect 10 isn’t filing a legitimate takedown. It’s just sending screenshots with no additional information. And what’s an “Adobe copy”?

Filed Under: canada, copyright, dmca, secondary liability
Companies: google, perfect 10