Google CEO Eric Schmidt once said that lawsuits were just part of doing business today. According to Perfect 10 Magazine, lawsuits are the only things that will save them, and have added Microsoft as the most recent defendant.
The adult magazine already lost its cases against Google and Amazon, but is appealing the court ruling that said neither company was violating Perfect 10’s copyrights by providing thumbnails of images owned by the magazine, nor by merely linking to sites that were violating copyrights by posting the pictures.
That wasn’t a clean for win for Google or Amazon, as one judge, before being overturned on appeal, said they could be partially liable for infringement for displaying the thumbnails.
Perfect 10 is hoping to push that logic more by suing Microsoft, who, they claim, not only has infringing thumbnails, but also links to full-sized images. They also say Perfect 10 website passwords could be found on the MSN site as well.
Like numerous print publications around the country, Perfect 10 shut down its print operation, citing the availability of their content for free on the Internet, which, consequently is also hurting their Web presence.
“Our business is being destroyed,” Perfect 10 president Norm Zada told InformationWeek. “This is a life and death battle for us.”
Though indexing images and providing thumbnails has been declared repeatedly as fair use, Perfect 10 says it has no choice but to go after the search engines, who make money from advertising next to allegedly infringing material, but that a good percentage of websites displaying their content are based in Russia or China.
