Notable among them are Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Giganews, Megaupload, Depositfiles Mastercard, Visa and Leaseweb. While Perfect 10 lacks a clear victory, it has achieved several settlements which has motivated the company to continue its legal crusade.

Late last week the publisher moved on to its next target, hosting company OVH. In their complaint Perfect 10 accuses the French company of providing hosting services to several websites that store pirated copies of their images.

“Defendants host and provide Internet connectivity and other essential services to websites, including infringing websites operated in California that have infringed tens of thousands of Perfect 10 Copyrighted Works,” the complaint states.

According to Perfect 10, OVH currently hosts over a dozen websites which store their work without permission, including celeb.to, celebforum.to, daily-ladies.com, gallery-dump.com, erooups.com, gophoto.us, hatuncenter.net, imagechunk.com, sualize.us, imgmaster.net, imagerise.com, ohfree.net, pixhost.eu and redblow.com.

The magazine publisher argues that OVH is directly responsible for these copyright infringements committed by its customers. The company says it sent 17 DMCA notices to OVH since 2011, identifying more than 12,000 infringing images, and believes the hosting provider should have taken the URLs in question offline.

“Defendants could have and should have ended the infringement by processing Perfect 10’s DMCA notices and removing the infringing images or by refusing to host the identified allegedly infringing websites, among other things,” the complaint explains.

“Defendants have failed to take such action and have failed to remove the infringing material that Perfect 10 has identified in its DMCA notices. Defendants’ conduct has caused, and continues to cause, severe and irreparable harm to Perfect 10,” they add.

The allegation doesn’t come as a surprise as hosting providers generally don’t take action based on DMCA takedown notices. Instead, they forward them to their clients, who are then responsible for resolving the issue. However, it appears that Perfect 10 wants to challenge this safe harbor principle.

Interestingly, OVH’s hosting services are not the only problem. In addition to the pirate sites, the company is also accused of passing on copyright-infringing Internet traffic of Google and other third-party sites through its American backbone.

“Third-party websites located in the United States, including Google.com, msn.com, yahoo.com, and blekko.com, among many others, have copied, distributed, and/or displayed thousands of infringing Perfect 10 Copyrighted Works hosted by Defendants. Defendants host and provide Internet connectivity and other essential services for these websites,” the complaint reads.

In an accusation that pretty much targets the core of the Internet, Perfect 10 believes that OVH should have taken action against the infringing files that pass through or are hosted in its network. Because OVH failed to do so, the publisher claims that it suffered significant losses and is now demanding the maximum statutory damages of $150,000 per infringement.

In theory this could get quite expensive. With a total of 1256 listed infringements OVH is facing up to $188 million in damages. However, considering Perfect 10′s track record in court the magazine publisher will probably be happy to settle for a tiny fraction of that.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Over the past several years the company has targeted a dozen high-profile companies including Google, Amazon, Yandex, Mastercard, Visa, RapidShare, Giganews and Depositfiles.

Earlier this year Perfect 10 continued its legal crusade by filing a lawsuit against Leaseweb, one of the largest webhosting companies on the Internet. According to the publisher, LeaseWeb provided services to several pirate sites, including the now defunct Megaupload.

In the complaint Perfect 10 argued that LeaseWeb is directly responsible for the copyright infringements of its customers, and that the hosting provider failed to take thousands of infringing URLs offline after they were notified via several DMCA notices.

LeaseWeb refuted many of the allegations that were put forward by the magazine publisher. Among other things, the hosting company stated that none of the notices that were sent by Perfect 10 conformed with the DMCA’s requirements. In addition, LeaseWeb denied that it knew about the claimed widespread infringements.

“LeaseWeb USA denies that it has actual knowledge of allegedly ‘rampant infringement’ by any of its customers and that it has committed copyright infringement. LeaseWeb USA denies it has knowingly aided and abetted massive alleged infringers, including megaupload.com,” the hosting company stated in a response.

While the legal battle in court continued, behind closed doors both parties were also discussing the option to end the case without bloodshed. This has now resulted in a settlement agreement and in a joint submission at a federal court in California they asked to dismiss the case.

This is not the first time that Perfect 10 has settled a case early, the same happened in its disputes against Amazon and Depositfiles. It can be assumed that LeaseWeb has paid the magazine publisher some form of compensation, but none of the parties is willing to comment on the terms of the settlement.

LeaseWeb informed TorrentFreak that it has nothing to say on the matter. The magazine publisher couldn’t comment on the case either, noting that the settlement agreement is confidential.

However, Perfect 10′s multi-millionaire founder Norm Zada stresses that piracy remains a massive problem. Talking to TorrentFreak, Zada calls for stricter enforcement against copyright infringers so these type of lawsuits aren’t needed.

“Widespread copyright infringement is hurting millions of people in the creative industries. The world desperately needs some form of Internet police that can deal with the hundreds of billions of dollars of intellectual property that is stolen each year,” Zada says.

“If your car gets stolen, you can call the police. When a person’s livelihood is destroyed by a theft of their intellectual property, there is no one to call. Most victims of intellectual property theft do not have the resources to file lawsuits and should not be required to do so,” he adds.

While the “hundreds of billions” figure is most likely a bit high, Perfect 10 is determined to deal with the problem with all means at its disposal. Since there is no Internet police just yet this most likely means filing another lawsuit, and another.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Earlier this month

“Defendants host and provide Internet connectivity and other essential services to websites, including infringing websites operated in California that have infringed tens of thousands of Perfect 10 Copyrighted Works,” the complaint states.

According to Perfect 10, LeaseWeb currently hosts at least eight websites in the U.S. which store their work without permission; Imgchili.net, imgchili.com, imgtiger.com, imgserve.net, Poringa.net, ultraforos.com, ultraforos.net and Galleryworld.info.

LeaseWeb’s former client Megaupload is also prominently mentioned as one of the websites through which copyrighted images were distributed. Megaupload’s servers were located both in the U.S. and Europe.

“The LeaseWeb Defendants have hosted the website megaupload.com on their servers located both in Virginia and in Europe,” the complaint states.

“Megaupload.com allegedly infringed upon Perfect 10’s Copyrighted Works until the website was seized and shut down in or about January 2012 following a federal indictment accusing the website of criminal copyright infringement.”

Perfect 10 argues that LeaseWeb is directly responsible for the copyright infringements of its customers. The company says it sent 22 DMCA notices to LeaseWeb early 2013, identifying 12,220 infringing images, and believes the hosting provider should have taken the URLs in question offline.

Previously Megaupload, who were sued themselves by Perfect 10 in 2011, informed TF that they swiftly responded to Perfect 10′s takedown notices.

“All infringing files Perfect 10 has ever reported to Mega have been removed within hours. We keep track of all DMCA notices and could identify all notifications from Perfect 10 and we have verified that all reported links were disabled within hours,” the company told us.

Perfect 10 nevertheless concludes that LeaseWeb is aware that it hosts infringing websites because of the DMCA notices they, and others, have sent over the years.

The adult company says it suffered significant losses and demands the maximum statutory damages of $150,000 per infringement. With a total of 1256 listed infringements this means that LeaseWeb is facing up to $188 million in damages.

While Perfect 10 doesn’t have a good track record in court, the case will be an important one to determine the liability of hosting providers for their customers’ actions. For that reason alone, it is worth keeping a close eye on the case.

Update: Leaseweb told Tf that the company hasn’t been served yet, and points out that most of the sites mentioned are hosted by the Dutch LeaseWeb Netherlands BV.

“We use the Dutch Notice and Takedown procedure for LeaseWeb Netherlands BV customers which gives an equivalent protection as the DMCA, we therefor do not see why the US would be the correct forum,” the company states.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

After the Megaupload shutdown the cyberlocker appeared to be one of the top alternatives. Aside from attracting new users, the site also grabbed the attention of Hollywood with the MPAA describing it as one of prime targets that should be dealt with next.

This is exactly what adult magazine publisher Perfect 10 has tried to do over the past months. June last year Perfect 10 filed a complaint against DepositFiles’ parent company, the Seychelles-based Kalmet Investments.

The publisher described DepositFiles as a “pirate website that sells access to large amounts of unauthorized intellectual property to the public without paying the rightful owners of that property” and demanded millions in damages for facilitating copyright infringement.

DepositFiles disputed the accusations, and both parties have been trying to convince the California District Court that they are right ever since. Earlier this year a schedule was setup to move the case to trial, but a recent filing reveals that this is not going to happen.

Both parties have reached a settlement that will be made official shortly. They therefore asked the Court to cancel all planned actions.

“Plaintiff Perfect 10, Inc. and defendant Kalmet Investments, Limited have reached a settlement in principle of this entire action. The parties are in the process of drafting a written settlement agreement and expect to execute it shortly.”

“The parties expect that all conditions of the settlement agreement will be met on or before July 16, 2012. Accordingly, the parties jointly move the Court to vacate all pre-trial dates so that they can devote all efforts to settlement efforts.”

Details on the settlement have not been disclosed, but it’s not unlikely that DepositFiles paid a sum of money to make the case go away. TorrentFreak contacted DepositFiles for a comment on the decision to settle but we were told that the company “cannot legally disclose anything on the issue.”

Perfect 10 are no strangers to lawsuits. From 2005 to the present day they have sued several huge companies for either allegedly using their images without permission or somehow being connected to infringements.

Notable among them are Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Yandex (for providing search engine results), Giganews, Megaupload, RapidShare, DepositFiles (hosting files) and Mastercard, Visa and CCBill for providing payment services for allegedly infringing sites.

Last month Perfect 10 added to this ever-growing list by suing the microblogging platform Tumblr.

A few settlements aside, the adult magazine publisher hasn’t been very successful in court. In 2010 Perfect 10 lost its case against RapidShare with the court ruling that the cyberlocker was not guilty of copyright infringement. Still, the legal endeavors must be successful enough for them to keep on going.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

“Perfect 10 is offering $25,000 (twenty-five thousand dollars) to the person who provides us with the most compelling non-public evidence of Google illegal conduct between now and February 28, 2012.”

“The type of evidence we are looking for would be emails between a webmaster and Google, showing that Google aided or condoned copyright infringement, or that Google was involved in other illegal activities not known to the general public.”

However, judging from the recent court updates this offer didn’t bring in the much-desired evidence. Both parties agreed to dismiss the case with prejudice, meaning it can no longer be appealed. “Perfect 10 agrees not to commence any future lawsuit against Google in any court arising from any such Google act or omission on or before the date of dismissal of this action, or any such DMCA notices sent by Perfect 10 on or before the date of dismissal of this action,” the court filing reads. Whether the dismissal follows on an out-of-court settlement is unknown. A Google spokesperson didn’t answer this specific question, instead offering the following comment. “We always asserted that there was no merit to this case. Plaintiff seemed to agree: last week he asked for a dismissal of the case with prejudice.” Another plausible reason for the dismissal could be that Perfect 10 was feeling the heat, as the court ordered the company to open its books and provide full insight into all internal communications regarding the court case. While the dismissal marks the end of a landmark case, Perfect 10 shows no sign of slowing down their legal actions. The company has a long history of copyright cases targeting companies such as Megaupload, Amazon, and Hotfile. Last month Russia’s Google equivalent Yandex joined these ranks, and earlier this week Perfect 10 sued the microblogging platform Tumblr. And so it continues.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Perfect 10 are no strangers to lawsuits. From 2005 to the present day they have sued several huge companies for either allegedly using their images without permission or somehow being connected to infringements.

Notable among them are Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Yandex(for providing search engine results), Giganews, Megaupload, Rapidshare, Depositfiles (hosting files) and Mastercard, Visa and CCBill for providing payment services for allegedly infringing sites.

Thus far most of this legal action was a complete failure, but Perfect 10 doesn’t give up.

This time they target Tumblr. According to Perfect 10, Tumblr failed to remove content when they were sent DMCA takedown notices.

“Tumblr has ignored its obligations under the DMCA,” the adult company writes in the complaint.

“As of the date of this filing, Tumblr has failed to completely process any of Perfect 10′s DMCA notices, taking down at most only a handful of the over 200 infringing images identified by Perfect 10, many of which had Perfect 10 copyright notices or watermarks conspicuously placed on the images.”

“Accordingly, Tumblr should be held liable for its failure to abide by its obligations under the DMCA and for willfully ignoring the widespread and uncontrolled copyright infringement pervading its website.”

The claims above are similar to what we’re seen in previous cases, but Perfect 10 goes even further by alleging that Tumblr employees pirated copyrighted images as well.

“Upon information and belief,Tumblr employees have posted infringing content to Tumblr servers, to help start the business, including content which infringes upon Perfect 10′s Copyrighted Works,” Perfect 10 writes in their complaint.

Perfect 10 demands that Tumblr destroys all infringing works on its servers and wants a cool $5 million to cover the damages that was done.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Notable among them are Google, Microsoft and Amazon (for providing search engine results) and Mastercard, Visa and CCBill for providing payment services for allegedly infringing sites. Private settlement with Amazon aside, most of this legal action was a complete failure.

Undeterred, in 2009 Perfect 10 went after cyberlocker giant RapidShare, claiming that the company was infringing its copyrights by having Perfect 10′s images on its servers. That case failed too and RapidShare countersued.

With one failed file-hosting lawsuit behind them, this year Perfect 10 went after another – MegaUpload – and with the ink barely dry on that lawsuit, the company is getting even more adventurous.

As spotted by Slyck, Perfect 10 have now sued Giganews, one the world’s leading Usenet providers. Also in their sights are a number of Giganews resellers under the umbrella of LiveWire Services Inc. Perfect 10 is throwing a number of allegations at the companies including copyright and trademark infringement and unfair competition.

Perfect 10 describes Giganews as a company operating “virtual warehouses containing billions of dollars worth of copyrighted works” including “pirated movies, songs, images [and] computer programs.”

Furthermore, Giganews is accused of inducing and assisting others to infringe copyright and of selling illegal content to LiveWire and associates including rhinonewsgroups.com, powerusenet.com, infinityusenet.com, eurousenet.com, galacticgroups.com, cheapnewsgroups.com, fastusenet.com, usenetgiant.com, and usenet.net.

“Defendants are also aware that the USENET no longer has any significant legitimate application and virtually all of the activity on the USENET involves the authorized copying and distribution of infringing materials,” Perfect 10 allege.

“Defendants have in total, copied, distributed, displayed, and sold, more than 165,000 Perfect 10 copyrighted images – roughly 15,000 Perfect 10 copyrighted images per website.”

It would not be a surprise if Perfect 10′s images were to be found on the worldwide Usenet system, but providing Giganews complies with correctly formatted DMCA takedown requests, the company has protection under the law. “Correctly formatted” appear to be the key words here.

Perfect 10 says that on March 25th 2009, it sent Giganews “800 Perfect 10 copyrighted images, a number of which displayed Perfect 10 copyright notices”. Apparently, Giganews wrote back explaining that they could not find the images in question based on the information in the notice, a claim that Perfect 10 refutes.

“Giganews could have found each and every one of those images by using its own search function to search for the image identifiers provided with Perfect 10’s notice,” say Perfect 10 in their lawsuit.

“Once it found an infringing Perfect 10 image in a particular group of such images (called an “article”), it could have blocked other Perfect 10 images displaying Perfect 10 copyright notices in that same group, but failed to do so,” the complaint adds. This appears to be a reference to some kind of proactive deletion work Perfect 10 required of Giganews.

TorrentFreak has it on good authority that Giganews does in fact comply with many rightsholders and takes down content quickly once it has received a correctly formatted DMCA complaint. One of the things they ask for is a so-called ‘Message-ID’, which in basic terms is equivalent to a URL on the worldwide web. Giganews even provide a template for takedown requests, which can be found here.

In their complaint Perfect 10 seem to suggest that by providing a DMCA complaint in the form of an actual image, it’s then the responsibility of Giganews to search for the items on Usenet in order to remove them. Interestingly, in their 2010 legal action against RapdShare it transpired that Perfect 10 had failed to provide precise locations for allegedly infringing content in their takedown notices, a factor which helped them lose the case.

After multiple attempts and failures in similar lawsuits, Perfect 10 will be hoping that Einstein was wrong all along and that progress against Giganews will net them a jury trial and the cool $25 million they’re claiming.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Does 1 to 100 in the lawsuit, which was filed 31st January in the California Southern District Court, are described as businesses owned, controlled by, or affiliated with Megaupload “which either directly or indirectly profit from and/or directly or indirectly infringe or facilitate the infringement of Perfect 10 intellectual property.”

The complaint states that Schmitz created MegaUpload for the specific purpose of storing, displaying and distributing intellectual property owned by others including “billions of dollars of pirated full-length movies, songs, software, and images.” It adds that Megaupload is not registered to do business in the United States and pays no US taxes.

Through its rewards program, which Perfect 10 claims offers $10,000 USD for 5,000,000 reward points, Megaupload “induces its customers to post content that is likely to be massively downloaded, such as high quality infringing nude images and popular full length movies and songs.”

Furthermore, Perfect 10 believe that Megaupload does not deserve ‘safe-harbor’ under the DMCA.

“Pirate websites such as megaupload.com, which obviously infringe massive quantities of movies, songs, images, and other extremely valuable copyrighted works, and directly profit from the infringing activity over which they have complete control, were never meant to be eligible to receive a DMCA safe harbor,” states the lawsuit.

“Furthermore, none of the five Megaupload websites listed above, including megaupload.com, identify the name, address, or phone number of their respective DMCA agents as required by 17 U.S.C. § 512(c)(2).”

Nevertheless, Perfect 10 says it sent Megaupload 22 notices in July and August 2010 informing the file-hoster “that it was infringing a vast collection of third party copyright works, Perfect 10 rights of publicity, and Perfect 10 copyrighted works.” Perfect 10 states that “as far as it can determine” most of the works have not been removed.

This has led the company to sue Megaupload for direct, contributory and vicarious infringement of “tens of thousands” of its images. Among other claims, Perfect 10 states that Megaupload also infringed and damaged its trademarks and became a source of unfair competition.

Perfect 10 is demanding that all defendants cease the unlawful copying, distribution and displaying of its copyright works and the same be deleted along with any links to such material between the defendants’ websites and their affiliates.

Damages of at least $5 million are claimed, plus punitive damages, attorney’s fees and full costs.

In 2009, Perfect 10 filed a lawsuit against the leading file-hosting service, RapidShare. Among other claims, Perfect 10’s complaint stated that RapidShare was guilty of infringing the copyrights of many of its images. In May 2010, the District Court of California ruled that RapidShare was not guilty of copyright infringement. RapidShare went on to countersue Perfect 10 “for being a copyright troll.”

Update: Here is a statement from Megaupload sent to TorrentFreak a few minutes ago.

We will file a motion shortly to dismiss the case. Our legal team is confident that we have nothing to worry about and they are working on a counter suit.

We also removed a link to content by the artist “Christina Aquilera” which was reported by the owner of Perfect 10 Mr. Norman Zada. But we doubt that Perfect 10 or Mr. Zada own the rights to works of that artist.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

“The success of Perfect 10′s business is almost entirely dependent on its intellectual property rights. Therefore, the ongoing and massive infringements of Perfect 10′s rights [by Rapidshare], is devastating to, and threatens the existence of, Perfect 10′s business,” states the lawsuit.

It goes on to claim that RapidShare stores hundreds of thousands of unauthorized copyright images and billions of dollars worth of songs and movies on its servers, and enables “users from around the world to purchase virtually every pirated image, song and movie for $10 a month.”

“RapidShare also offers, without authorization, Perfect 10 DVDs and videos, including Perfect 10 Model Of The Year Video, which cost approximately $1,000,000 to produce,” notes the lawsuit, further adding that RapidShare infringes Perfect 10′s copyrights on 26,000 images and videos.

According to Perfect 10, they informed RapidShare on 29 May 2009 that it was hosting and “offering for sale” 800 specifically identified Perfect 10 images. They claim the file-hoster failed to respond to, or act on, that notification.

The California-based company called for a jury trial in the United States to settle the issue. RapidShare responded by requesting that the case be postponed and transferred to Europe and heard under German law. According to XBiz, that request has now been denied.

Last week a court confirmed that the hearing will take place in San Diego’s U.S. District Court next month, a case Perfect 10 owner Norm Zada feels he can win.

RapidShare claims that Perfect 10 has failed to inform them of the location of the infringing material on their servers. If it knew where the material was, the file-hoster said it would willingly remove it. Zada shrugs off responsibility for that work.

“It’s not my obligation or up to me to spend time finding those links. That’s not my problem. They need to stop selling what they don’t own,” he explains.

RapidShare denies that it sells Perfect 10 material and insists it functions purely as a storage site. Zada vehemently denies those claims.

“They’re not a storage locker. RapidShare is the greatest infringing paysite of all time,” he told XBiz. “They’re making $80 million a year that belongs to American studios and producers.”

TorrentFreak contacted RapidShare for their reaction to these accusations but they refused to comment.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.