Newsmaker: Porn, Google and the courts

Norm Zada is no Hugh Hefner.

But this adult content publisher has one thing Hefner does not. A major legal win against Internet giant Google.

Last week, Zada's Perfect 10 publication won a preliminary injunction against Google for alleged copyright infringement over its use of thumbnail photos of Perfect 10 models.

Champion of copyrights is the latest hat Zada's wearing--pulled from a closet with an assortment as wide-ranging as author, money manager, former university professor and mathematician.

Zada, who authored "Winning Poker Systems" for Prentice-Hall, also has geek blood running deep through his veins.

In addition to a stint at button-down IBM as a research staff member in the early 1970s, he wrote such papers as the "Theoretical efficiency of the Edmonds-Karp algorithm for computing maximal flows."

And then there's his dad, the renowned Lotfi Zadeh, who is considered by many in the technology industry to be the "father of fuzzy logic."

CNET News.com recently spoke to Zada, who formerly went by Norman Zadeh, about his life and his company's entanglement with Google, which these days are increasingly becoming one and the same.

Q: Perfect 10 has won a major round in its copyright fight against Google, which could ultimately affect the way people search for photos and other content online. But few people know the name Norm Zada like they do Hugh Hefner. Who is Norm Zada?
Zada: I was a research staff member for IBM in their main computer science department from 1972 to 1973. I also had teaching jobs at Stanford, Columbia, UCLA and UC Irvine (from 1975 to 1982) that were either in operations research, which is applied math for business, or in the business schools. So, I am basically a very applied mathematician.

After I stopped teaching at UCLA in 1982, I started running financial competitions called the U.S. Trading Championship and the U.S. Investing Championship. Later, I ran an investing competition called Money Manager Verified Ratings. Those contests were carried by Barrons and various other financial magazines and newspapers, and people started asking me who they should invest with and so forth.

I started referring them to various money managers and decided in 1991 to start managing money myself. I've been managing money ever since, with only one losing year, in 2003.

I gave back all my clients' money in 2003 and quit. But I resurrected my money management business in 2004 to make enough money to cover all the ongoing losses in Perfect 10. I've lost over $42 million in Perfect 10 since its inception in 1996. I am still a money manager and use my earnings in money management to finance Perfect 10.

How did you make the transition from university professor to publisher of adult content?
Zada: There are a lot of reasons. I've always been a lover of women, and I've always been very supportive of women. And I felt there was something wrong with what Playboy was doing. They were recommending implants to women that didn't need implants, and I just thought that implants are a very bad thing for women. Women's bodies are beautiful naturally, and they shouldn't feel they have to augment their bodies in order to be OK. So, I thought, let me start an all-natural magazine, which doesn't allow implants. I also thought I could make money doing it and thought it would be an interesting challenge. And I had a friend who had just been turned down by Playboy, and she was very distraught. And I said to myself, what can I do to make her feel better about herself? I said, I guess I'll have to start a magazine and put her in it. That wasn't the main reason, obviously, but it was one of the factors. I wanted something that would be more respectful of women. I thought I could make money doing it, and I wanted to help my friend.

If the ultimate conclusion from all of this is you can't assert secondary liability against people who are benefiting from intellectual property...then that will be the end of motion pictures, songs and Perfect 10.

And it's kind of cool when you publish a magazine. It's enabled me to interview some of the people that I would otherwise not have ever been able to interview. I've interviewed Dion DiMucci of Dion and the Belmonts, Felix Cavaliere of the Rascals. We've interviewed Morgan Freeman, Ray Charles, Sugar Ray Leonard, Robin Williams and Sidney Pollack. We've interviewed a tremendous number of wonderful people. We have a wonderful writing crew for Perfect 10, consisting of David Black, who is our editor in chief and former executive producer of "CSI: Miami." Most of the Perfect 10 writers are outstanding.

We have tried real hard to make a wonderful, wonderful publication, and we think we're entitled to benefit from the wonderful film that we've created that nobody else has. The problem is, everyone is infringing it, including large corporations, and benefiting from our hard work.

There have been a lot of people who have not been very sympathetic with Perfect 10, but I think that if they worked really hard to create a business and they had products they were proud of, they would go nuts if people were utilizing their products to make money at their expense. And that's what's happening right now.

And what is your prediction on how the courts will ultimately rule?
Zada: I'm pretty sure we'll win on the direct infringement issue. But the problem is that many of the direct infringers are in places like Russia and China, and there's no way to track them down. As far as indirect or secondary infringement is concerned, it's too easy for people to take advantage of our material without actually copying it themselves.

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[Earl Benser]

The father of Fuzzy Logic

... probably never counted on this example of fuzzy logic.

[bdennis410]

Perfect 10 less than perfect

Sorry, I can't agree.
The whole purpose of Internet publishing, as I see it, is to disseminate information, entertainment, and so on. I wrote to Marketing Sherpa some time ago, and more recently to others, that "foul" claims of plagiarized content were just specious given the ubiquitous nature of the Internet.
Better that content is restricted by Subscription and/or Registration for access, rather than publishers complaining about stolen content when they publish it on the most ubiquitous and far-reaching platform ever.
The choice to publish "content" of whatever nature is to get it read; fowarded, disseminated, considered, isn't it?
Otherwise, why bother?
So, if publishers want their "content" guarded, copyrighted, protected, then require a Subscription and/or a Registration to obtain access. That way free "links" won't work, and consumers will voice their negative opinion, as I have, to IAB and others, noting that for them to offer links to restricted sites is a waste of their readers and subscribers time. Their explanation that their trolling mechanisms for keywords and news don't discriminate between accessible and Restricted sites, like the Wall Street Journal (some content readable, some requires a subscription) and their actual self-propagated plagiarism of the content of free and subscription sites that they participate in, just don't justify their failure to warn their readers that some links require a Registration or Subscription, and to provide that warning for each and every link, individually as part of the "headline" they use to generate interest in the content.
As far as Perfect 10 goes, why publish if you don't want people to read your content? Publish and promote only to Subscribers and avoid the problem.
You(Perfect 10) just want to "have your cake and eat it too."
The reason that Perfect 10 and others don't restrict access to their content is that they want to control access to drive advertising revenues, whatever.
Sorry, guys. If you are going to be an Internet publisher and offer unrestricted access, then you have to give up the idea of controlling who links to your site, and the coincident and obvious result of search engine (re)publishing of your content.
So, quit whining and make up your mind; publish for Subscribers only, or allow unrestricted linking(doesn't that get your content promoted, disseminated)?
Some time ago I suggested that newspapers would have to offer the same model to survive the death of the over 50, reads print generation. And I wondered what would happen to their readership if they restricted access to those who were Subscribers, with no ads, high-quality content, and at the same time offered an ad-supported, freely accessible site with the same content, but no ads. Would they do it? Would the Wall Street Journal have the intestinal fortitude to see if an advertiser supported, free content publication would survive in competition with a no advertising, same content Subscription model?
If they offered the no advertising, high quality content subscription model only, would they be able to resist the siren call of "just a few ads" to see how much additional profit they could generate? Which business model would generate the most profit? The big question? ill any publisher have the "cojones" to offer ONLY a Piad Subscription, high quality content, NO ADS, publication? I don't think so, because they just can't resist the smell of profits generated through advertising. Forget what would be a great product or service for the consumer.
I only hope that eventually consumers will "wake up" to the reality that paying for content should mean that you don't (shouldn't)get advertising at the same time.
I don't like paying ten dollars for a movie ticket to watch a feature film, and then get twenty minutes of advertising that I don't want as a condition of taking my seat. And the worst thing, the absolutely most frustrating thing, is that consumers just sit there and take it!
I have stopped going to movies.
So Perfect 10, bite the bullet and restrict access to only Paid Subscribers, or stop whining.
And that includes your Home Page and Free Tour pages. Why won't you do that? Because if you did, you'd get nada, zip, zilch, zero in the way on Online subscriptions.
The reality is that the future of the Internet will depend on the advertiser supported, free-content model. Certain segments will continue to be Subscriber supported, like porno, and others will develop.
But, I'd bet that in ten years, or less, we'll see a predominately free content, advertiser supported business model prevail. And like magazines, there will be a bunch of Paid Subscriber only access sites, whose content won't be able to be linked to, except by publisher choice, and I'd also bet my left one that even the Paid Subscriber only sites will have advertising.
So much for hoping for the voice of the consumer to be heard.
Oh, and Perfect 10? Who are you kidding with your claim for "au natural" models? You're just a porn site like the others. Maybe a little less XXX, and a little more "R,' but not much difference, overall

Diogenes

[mwa423]

There isn't enough about the real issue out, they have restricted content

What they're suing google over is that pirates are paying for a subscription fee then putting perfect10 content on other websites then google is indexing those. How much of a slippery slope is this? Now, if somebody pirates anything and puts it on a website, google is responsible for indexing it? If somebody misconfigures a webserver and accidently puts copyrighted material up, and google indexes it, google is responsible?

[Andrey_Prokopenko]

What Zara is trying to achieve is very negative to me.
PLEASE, STOP AND RETRACT this lawsuit.
Google can't be sued for accidentally indexing a copyrighted material.
This whole lawsuit sounds like a trolling company for me.