Adult site's legal battle could aid Web hosting services

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A federal appeals court ruling in a case involving an adult publisher appears to have delivered broader legal protections for online service providers against lawsuits claiming privacy violations and other illicit behavior by their users.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit on Thursday released a 26-page opinion (PDF) that upholds a number of lower court findings against the adult-oriented Web site Perfect 10 in a lawsuit against a family of companies including Web hosting service CWIE and credit-card processing firm CCBill.
The same appeals court is also preparing to release rulings in two other cases involving Perfect 10, whose online presence boasts "thousands of images of the most beautiful natural women in the world"--one against Google and Amazon.com and the other against MasterCard and Visa.
Perfect 10's suit against Arizona-based CWIE and CCBill dates back to 2002 and includes a wide array of allegations, including copyright and trademark infringement, unfair competition, false advertising, and violation of right of publicity--that is, protection against unauthorized commercial use of a person's image or name.
Attorneys for Perfect 10 and the Web hosts did not respond to requests for comment on Friday.

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Adult site's legal battle could aid Web hosting services | Tech News on ZDNet