One of the original "copyright trolls," a porn company called Perfect 10, has been slapped with a massive $5.6 million fee award that could finally shut down the decade-old lawsuit factory.

Perfect 10's model has been to sue third-party providers for carrying images of its porn. It hasn't been afraid to go after big targets, either—Perfect 10 even sued Google over its image search, resulting in an appeals court case that made crystal clear that such searches are fair use. Despite that ruling, Perfect 10 went ahead and sued Microsoft on similar grounds three months later.

The company also sued Giganews, a Usenet provider, in April 2011. Perfect 10 pursued claims for both indirect and direct copyright infringement, stating that Giganews employees directly uploaded infringing images onto its network. Giganews ultimately prevailed on all grounds; now, Perfect 10 has been required to pay its substantial legal bill as well.

“Online service providers and Internet companies are under assault from copyright trolls like Perfect 10, but we have followed the DMCA since its inception and are proud to have stood up to the meritless claims of a serial litigator who was hoping for an easy pay day," said Giganews co-founder Ron Yokubaitis in a statement about the fee award.

The order (PDF) by US District Judge Andre Birotte is a stinging takedown of the tactics used by Perfect 10 and its owner, Norman Zada.

Zada, a former computer science professor and poker player, founded Perfect 10 as a softcore print magazine in 1997, a pretty dicey time in history to start any kind of print magazine. He told the press that he intended the magazine to be a "classy" alternative to Playboy and Hustler, but it never took off.

The Perfect 10 website is still online and advertises "the world's most beautiful natural women." Zada has filed "between 20 and 30 lawsuits" to date, according to Birotte's order.

The company "has lost more than $50 million" to date, but that apparently hasn't been a problem for Zada, because he "is able to deduct Perfect 10's significant losses on his personal income taxes." Zada said that he "needed [Perfect 10] to offset money he made in the market" and wanted the failing company "to represent how small businesses couldn’t make money because of piracy."

In addition to suing over his own content, Zada bought copyrights from others expressly because he believed they'd be helpful in litigation.

Birotte found behavior was "inconsistent with that of a plaintiff interested in actually protecting its copyrights." Zada said he spends "eight hours per day, 365 days per year" on Perfect 10 litigation, but he spends 40 to 50 hours per year—about a week—attempting to "create new artistic content."

Making takedowns tough

Of course, companies are supposed to be protected from this type of litigation as long as they follow the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and respond promptly to copyright owners' concerns. But Zada's "takedowns" ensured that he'd be able to send a lawsuit because his DMCA notices were always fatally flawed. He didn't give enough information to the service provider about where to actually find his images, and then he would sue when the material inevitably remained up.

Zada pursued this strategy at a time when big content companies have mastered the art of mass-produced takedown notices; Google processed 345 million takedown notices last year. In the case against Giganews, Perfect 10 admitted that it could have created a takedown notice "in 15 minutes" that would have removed 90 percent of its content from Giganews' servers, but it refused to do so. Zada said it would be "very easy" for Perfect 10 to create one DMCA notice for about 54,000 messages that contained Perfect 10 content, but Zada dismissed that as "simply helping [defendants] actually remove the material."

In the end, seeing a fee award on the way, Perfect 10 tried to argue that Giganews' request was far too large and reflected a "billing frenzy" on behalf of the company's lawyers. The judge didn't agree. He reduced Giganews' initial request for $6.1 million in legal fees to $5.2 million and gave the company its full-cost award of $424,235.