Porn publisher Perfect 10 has sued Tumblr, claiming the popular blogging site failed to remove unauthorized photos taken from the company’s magazine and website, Paid Content’s Jeff John Roberts reported.
In a complaint filed Friday afternoon in Manhattan, Perfect 10 President Norm Zada claimed that the company has sent six requests to Tumblr asking that the site to remove certain photos, none of which have been returned.
Zada wrote in his 11-page complaint:
“As of the date of this filing, Tumblr has failed to completely process any of Perfect 10’s DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) notices, taking down at most only a handful of the over 200 infringing images identified by Perfect 10, many of which had Perfect 10 copyright notices or watermarks consciously placed on the images. Accordingly, Tumblr should be held liable for its failure to abide by its obligations under the DMCA and for willfully ignoring the widespread and uncontrolled copyright infringement pervading its website.”
The legalities surrounding image sharing has become a hot topic of late on social-sharing sites like Tumblr and Pinterest, where users regularly repost pictures to their pages without proper documentation or credit. Just last week, Pinterest reached a deal with photo-sharing site Flickr to make crediting photographers automatic. Tumblr, as evidenced by this lawsuit, has yet to implement any such documentation system.
This is not the first time that Perfect 10 has taken to the court to work out copyright legalities with a popular website. In 2004, the company sued Google for using thumbnail images in its search results. A court ruled that thumbnails fell under fair use in 2006.
Tumblr’s case is quite different, however. Since the blogging platform publishes full-size images and not thumbnails, it’s likely that the site will face a drastically different ruling than the one bestowed upon Google six years ago.
Photo via Moon Wolfe
