San Francisco - The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and other founders and participants in the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse urged an appeals court in an amicus brief filed Tuesday to reject an adult entertainment publisher's attempts to block Google's contributions to the online copyright resource. Durie Tangri LLP represented EFF and its co-amici in preparing and filing the brief.
Chilling Effects, at www.chillingeffects.org, gathers and analyzes legal notices alleging online copyright infringement. More than 12,000 notices are available for public review, education and study, and the data there has been the basis for a number of scholarly papers about copyright law and the Internet.
Google is one of many businesses and organizations that provide the legal notices it receives to Chilling Effects. But as part of a long-running court battle with Google, adult publisher Perfect 10 claims that forwarding its infringement notices to the online resource is a copyright infringement, because Perfect 10 includes its copyrighted adult images on the notifications.
"The use of copyrighted works for scholarship or research, like in Chilling Effects, is clearly a fair use of the material and protected under the law," said EFF Intellectual Property Director Corynne McSherry. "Chilling Effects is an important public resource for educating the public and studying the effects of online copyright law -- so important that Perfect 10 itself has used the data as part of its copyright infringement lawsuits. Google's contributions to this resource don't infringe copyright simply because Perfect 10 chooses to attach samples of its adult photos in its infringement notices."
The lawsuit stretches back to 2005, when Perfect 10 first sued Google claiming that Google's Image Search service violated copyright law by indexing Perfect 10 photos posted on unauthorized websites, as well as a hodgepodge of other claims. In 2007, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected virtually all of Perfect 10's claims, but it sent the case back down to the district court to determine whether Perfect 10's legal notices of infringement complied with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The district court held in Google's favor, finding that Perfect 10's notices were not sufficient under the law, and as part of that ruling the court held that Google's contributions to Chilling Effects are protected by the fair use doctrine. Perfect 10 is appealing that ruling back to the 9th Circuit.
"People scour the Chilling Effects archive in order to write academic papers and research the law, not to look for adult photos," said EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn. "As the district court recognized, this is another bogus copyright claim from Perfect 10 that could have dangerous ramifications for fair use and the Internet."
For the full amicus brief:
https://www.eff.org/files/filenode/Perfect10_v_Google/2010-12-21P10vGoogle%20amicus.pdf
Contact:
Corynne McSherry
Intellectual Property Director
Electronic Frontier Foundation
corynne@eff.org
