Giganews vs Perfect 10 – Victory for USENET
Last Updated: Nov 24, 2014
Giganews scored a nice victory against Perfect 10, a notorious copyright troll that may want to consider changing their name to Perfect Zero, considering their win/loss record for filing frivolous lawsuits against various types of service providers.
On the surface, Perfect 10 might seem to be one of the innumerable porn companies on the Internet, but they have a long history of filing lawsuits against companies for copyright infringement, losing, and, in the process, establishing that some of the arguments made by the copyright cartels are absolutely ridiculous.
In this case, Giganews was sued over allegations of copyright infringement on its USENET service. The way the law stands now, in order to sue someone for copyright infringement, you have to establish that the company had some sort of direct financial benefit from that copyright infringement. Perfect 10 failed to do so and, in bringing their lawsuit, used some of the same failed arguments they’ve already tried in the past. Needless to say, Giganews scored the proverbial flawless victory in this case.
Really Sloppy
Not only did Perfect 10 utterly lose this case, the judge in the case also pointed out that Perfect 10 sends DMCA takedown requests that are invalid. The reason for this appears to be because Perfect 10 wants to file a lawsuit and, because the DMCA requests are incorrectly worded, there’s no way for the provider to comply with them, thus opening up the opportunity for a lawsuit, at least in the eyes of Perfect 10.
Techdirt reported some elements of the Perfect 10 lawsuit that would be humorous, if these lawsuits weren’t wasting the time of courts that need to be accessible to people with claims that are actually valid. For instance, the court pointed out that Perfect 10 could have provided Giganews with clearer takedown requests, but apparently chose not to. The court also noted that, when Giganews does get specific information on something on their servers that violates someone’s copyright, they take it down in accordance with the law.
One of the real victories here has to do with how copyright trolls work and how people can avoid falling for their schemes. Giganews took Perfect 10 on, which is likely what the plaintiff didn’t want to happen. Copyright trolls will oftentimes count on people not bothering to fight the lawsuit, due to the expense, and get some easy money out of the deal. As the Giganews case demonstrates, however, when people do have the financial wherewithal to take copyright trolls on, it often turns out that the lawsuits don’t have any merit and are just designed as an easy way for companies to get money based on specious claims.
