WASHINGTON, D.C. — Strike Force Zadeh may simply be stalled in contributory copyright-infringement lawsuits against search engines and Internet retailers, but its pursuit of online payment service providers has come to an end. The Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear Perfect 10 Inc.’s case against credit-card processors.Perfect 10 owner Norman Zadeh for several years has been engaging in serial lawsuits with companies and individuals he accuses of pirating or contributing to the piracy of his company’s copyrighted content. Until recently Perfect 10 published an adult magazine; now it publishes only online, and part of the reason for that, Zadeh has said, is the financial losses the company has suffered through piracy.
Determined to halt the unauthorized use of Perfect 10’s images, Zadeh sued so-called “intermediate” companies — like Google, Amazon.com, Mastercard Inc., Visa International Service Association and third-party financial processing firms CCBill LLC and CWIE — which he says contribute to the enrichment of content thieves.
Perfect 10’s suit against CCBill, CWIE and the card associations (Perfect 10 Inc. v. CCBill LLC, 07-266) was dismissed earlier this year when the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled that sections of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the Communications Decency Act shielded financial processors from contributory liability arising from the actions of their clients. Zadeh, determined that the processors should be taken to task, appealed to the Supreme Court, which by declining to hear the case, allowed the lower court’s dismissal to stand.
The cases against Google and Amazon.com continue.
