For those of you just joining us, some background: In November 2004, Perfect 10 asked a federal district court judge to bar Google from indexing pictures and links to the company’s photos. Perfect 10 objected to Google search results displaying thumbnails of its photos, along with the links to third-party sites providing larger versions. The pictures were copyrighted, it claimed, and many of the sites included in Google’s search results were using them without permission.

“In some cases, as many as 96% of Google search results on Perfect 10 model names go not to Perfect10.com, but to infringing Google AdSense partners of which Google has received notice,” Perfect 10 founder Norm Zada argued at the time. “That’s not legitimate search. Google’s extraordinary gain in market cap from nothing a few years ago to close to $80 billion is more due to their massive misappropriation of intellectual property than anything else. Google is currently displaying over 3,000 Perfect 10 copyrighted images and linking them to Web sites containing numerous other Perfect 10 copyrighted images and in many cases ads for which Google earns revenue. Google is no longer a legitimate search engine. It is a commercial advertising operation determined to increase ad revenue regardless of what rights it tramples on in the process. If all an infringer needs to avoid liability is to provide some sort of a ‘search function,’ that will be the end of intellectual property in this country.”

Some corollary, right? How ironic is it that Zada’s father, Lotfi Zadeh, is known as the father of fuzzy logic?

Anyway … after years of litigation, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals appears to have slapped down Perfect 10 once and for all, ruling that it failed to show that it suffered irreparable harm at Google’s hands. If the site, as it claimed, suffered over $50 million in losses from 1996 to 2007, it has no one to blame but itself.

“While being forced into bankruptcy qualifies as a form of irreparable harm, Perfect 10 has not established that the requested injunction would forestall that fate,” Judge Sandra Ikuta wrote for the court. “Perfect 10 has not shown a sufficient causal connection between irreparable harm to Perfect 10’s business and Google’s operation of its search engine.”

[Image credit: Leo Reynolds]

Like those brought against Google and Amazon before it, the lawsuit alleges that Microsoft’s MSN image search displays thumbnail images linking to sites that host infringing pictures. “Microsoft is showing tens of thousands of extremely valuable celebrity images, along with Perfect 10 images, without authorization, which it obtains from hundreds if not thousands of pirate Web sites,” Perfect 10 President Norm Zada said in a statement. “Search engines could greatly reduce infringement if they would simply delist obvious infringers upon receiving notice, and stop copying and linking to copyrighted works without permission.”

Perhaps. But wouldn’t these infringements be more easily reduced by, you know, suing the infringers themselves? Taking legal action against third parties for not enforcing your copyrights seems a circuitous way of resolving disputes like these.

Like those brought against Google and Amazon before it, the lawsuit alleges that Microsoft’s MSN image search displays thumbnail images linking to sites that host infringing pictures. “Microsoft is showing tens of thousands of extremely valuable celebrity images, along with Perfect 10 images, without authorization, which it obtains from hundreds if not thousands of pirate Web sites,” Perfect 10 President Norm Zada said in a statement. “Search engines could greatly reduce infringement if they would simply delist obvious infringers upon receiving notice, and stop copying and linking to copyrighted works without permission.”

Perhaps. But wouldn’t these infringements be more easily reduced by, you know, suing the infringers themselves? Taking legal action against third parties for not enforcing your copyrights seems a circuitous way of resolving disputes like these.