YNOT – Perfect 10 owner Norm Zada is nothing if not persistent.Despite repeated dismissals of previous claims, this week Zada filed new legal paperwork in the magazine-cum-website’s ongoing dispute with Google. The new motion seeks sanctions against the search giant for “widespread discovery abuse” and alleged violations of three court orders.
According to a Perfect 10 press release, Google has failed to satisfy Digital Millennium Copyright Act requirements by not “act[ing] expeditiously to remove or disable access to infringing material upon receiving notice of infringement from the copyright owner.” According to Zada, Google “must act, and it must adopt a procedure so that copyright holders will not have to provide the search engine with notices about the same infringing material or the same infringers over and over.”
Perfect 10 also alleges Google failed to respond to a judge’s order to produce its “DMCA log,” which the press release defined as “a spreadsheet-type document summarizing DMCA notices received, the identity of the notifying party and the accused infringer and the actions (if any) taken in response.”
Without the information and documentation it seeks, Perfect 10 cannot proceed with its pursuit of Google for copyright violations. Google, of course, contends everything for which Zada and Perfect 10 seek redress is covered under the DMCA’s “safe harbor” provisions that exempt certain virtual publishers from liability for contributory or vicarious copyright abuse.
The Perfect 10-Google tussle began in 2004 when Zada accused Google of publishing thumbnail images without permission. According to Zada, the search engine’s image-search facility is nothing more than content theft. Google insists its posting of thumbnails from the sites it indexes constitutes fair use. Perfect 10 won the first case, only to see the court’s ruling overturned by an appeals panel in 2007.
Zada filed again, and he is not disposed to let Google off the hook anytime soon.
“Google appears to have the view that it is above the law,” he notes in the press release. “We spent a great deal of time and effort obtaining court orders requiring Google to produce documents critical to our case. In our view, Google has not complied with those orders.”
The current motion is set for a hearing Dec. 21.
