Adult-Themed Website Perfect 10 Sues Google, Amazon Over Search Results   8/1/2005 - 1,267 views, 1 Comment

Said Norm Zada, Perfect 10’s founder, “I claim that what they’ve done is to display misappropriated intellectual property. They are displaying at least 3,000 of our best pictures for free.”

Zada’s primary argument in the lawsuit seems to be that people use Google to search for pictures of the Perfect 10 women, and then click on the sponsored links on the results page, which links are to advertisers using Google’s Adwords and Adsense programs.

“Google is not a search engine anymore. They are a commercial enterprise. They are listing pages first that are advertising with Google,” said Zada. Therefore, the argument goes, Google is profiting from infringing Perfect 10’s copyright interest in the images.

Interestingly, the attorney who brought this lawsuit for Perfect 10 is the same attorney who brought the lawsuit against Grokster, Russell Frackman. Said Jason Schultz, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, with not a little apparent disdain, “Frackman believes that everyone should be held responsible for policing content infringement on the Internet, or whoever has the deepest pockets should. The copyright maximalists hate intermediaries — search engines, ISPs and anyone else with whom they don’t have a direct licensing agreement.”