Apparently not content after losing legal battles with both Amazon's A9 and Google, soft-core porn site Perfect 10 filed last Tuesday in a California district court against Microsoft's MSN search engine, alleging that the engine is providing links and images to sites that are illegally hosting its content. Perfect 10 claims that the MSN image search engine creates unauthorised thumbnails of Perfect 10's premium content, as well as including links to see full-size versions of the images for free. In addition, the site also claims that the search engine is finding passwords to its paid-for content on other sites, thereby allowing it to access Perfect 10's pay-only material, and that Microsoft is receiving money through advertising from websites that are illegally hosting the images.
"Microsoft has rejected efforts to reach a settlement and our business is being destroyed," said Norm Zada, president of Perfect 10. Zada claims the search engines are responsible as they make it easy for surfers to find infringing content, and is costing the company $4m a month. Although earlier it looked like Perfect 10 might win its case against Google and Amazon after a judge ruled that the two companies could be partially liable for infringement for displaying the thumbnails, the decision was struck down by a judge for the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, who cited "fair-use" principles and pointed out that the full-sized images were not hosted by the search engines. Perfect 10 is appealing the court overruling, but as yet no court date has been set.
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