Having unsuccessfully sued Amazon and Google for copyright infringement, the nude photography publisher Perfect 10 is setting its sights on Microsoft with a lawsuit against the company for reproducing their content in MSN Image Search without permission, as well as linking to other sites through its search engine that also commit copyright infringement.
"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 websites," says Norm Zada, a former Stanford professor and president of Perfect 10.
Perfect 10 has also sued no less than 28 allegedly infringing websites but most of those were based outside the US and out of reach. Instead, Zada said he holds the search engines responsible for making it easy to find infringing content.
Whether it is a legitimate complaint or a simple cry for attention is debatable, but looking the company's history of litigations it would seem Perfect 10 is trying to sue its way to profitability. I'm no expert but, perhaps using a simple robot exclusion would prevent web spiders and other web robots from accessing all or part of the website which is, otherwise, publicly viewable.