Adult magazine publisher Perfect 10 has made a business out of suing online services for allegedly facilitating copyright infringement.
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.
