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Porn studio loses appeal in Google copyright case

A federal appeals court denies a request by an adult-entertainment company to issue an injunction against Google.

Greg Sandoval Former Staff writer
Greg Sandoval covers media and digital entertainment for CNET News. Based in New York, Sandoval is a former reporter for The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. E-mail Greg, or follow him on Twitter at @sandoCNET.
Greg Sandoval

A U.S. appeals court didn't accept the assertion that an adult-entertainment company was nearly driven out of business by Google search results that display thumbnail photos of the site's porn photos.

The Ninth Circuit ruled that Perfect 10, a porn studio with a long history of filing copyright suits against Internet companies, rejected a request for a preliminary injunction against Google. The court said that Perfect 10 didn't present enough evidence to prove that it would suffer irreparable harm from the photos.

Perfect 10 claims Google's software and Web crawler have caused $50 million in losses and the company. But the company failed to present a single former customer who said he or she had stopped paying Perfect 10's subscription fees because of the availability of Google's thumbnail photos.

In addition to filing suit against Google, Perfect 10 has filed suit against Amazon, Visa, and Megaupload, the controversial file-storage business. Last week, a U.S. district judge denied a motion by Megaupload to throw out Perfect 10's complaint and will allow the case to go forward.

Perfect 10 was founded by Norm Zada, a former IBM employee and math professor at Stanford University. Zada is also the son of Lotfi Zadeh, the father of fuzzy logic mathematics.

Perfect 10 was created as the anti-Playboy after a friend was rejected by the magazine. Zadeh's content features women who have not received any surgical enhancements. The company has told the court that it is on the verge of bankruptcy.