End May Be Near For Perfect 10 Copyright Troll Suits

LOS ANGELES—When we last heard from alleged copyright troll Perfect 10 Inc., its cert petition to the U.S. Supreme Court, appealing the District Court's award, later affirmed by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, was denied last December. Because of the ruling, the magazine/website will have to pay Giganews News and LiveWire Services more than $5.6 million in attorney fees and costs. The figure was awarded to Giganews after is had to defend itself against Perfect 10's claims that thumbnails of its images had appeared on the defendants' websites, and that therefore they were liable for copyright infringement of those images. But thanks to the apparently litigious nature of Perfect 10's owner, Norman Zada, Giganews and LiveWire have been back in court, looking for additional legal fees and costs accrued in their defense of Perfect 10's federal appeals since the original verdict was rendered—and earlier today, District Court Appellate Commissioner Peter L. Shaw awarded both companies an additional $855,532.72 for those legal expenditures, raising Perfect 10's debt to more than $6.5 million in total. Giganews had asked the commissioner to award it nearly $730,000 in new legal fees and roughly an additional $230,000 for clerical work performed by paralegals, but based on Shaw's examination of the hours billed by Giganews' attorneys, the San Francisco law firm of Fenwick & West, LLC, and its paralegals, Shaw reduced the claim by about $100,000—still leaving a quite a dent in Perfect 10's cash flow if Giganews ever manages to collect the sum. Perfect 10 has been on a losing streak for more than a dozen years, having been trounced in alleged copyright infringement cases by everyone from Visa and Mastercard to Microsoft to Google to Amazon to Tumblr to CCBill to several others, and it had been fighting the Giganews case since 2011. However, the commissioner's award should put the final nail in the coffin of that case.