Perfect 10, Inc. v. Amazon.com, Inc.

Perfect 10, Inc. v. Amazon.com, Inc.
Court	United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit
Full case name	Perfect 10, Inc. v. Amazon.com, Inc. and A9.com Inc. and Google Inc.
Argued	November 15, 2006
Decided	May 16, 2007
Citation	508 F.3d 1146
Case history
Prior history	Grant of partial injunctive relief: Perfect 10 v. Google, Inc., 416 F. Supp. 2d 828 (C.D. Cal. 2006).
Holding
The use of thumbnail versions of copyright images for search engine purposes is transformative use, and falls within the fair use provisions of United States copyright law.
Court membership
Judges sitting	Cynthia Holcomb Hall, Michael Daly Hawkins, and Sandra S. Ikuta
Case opinions
Majority	Ikuta, joined by Hall, Hawkins
Laws applied
17 U.S.C. § 107

Perfect 10, Inc. v. Amazon.com, Inc., 508 F.3d 1146 (9th Cir., 2007) was a case in the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit involving a copyright infringement claim against Amazon.com, Inc. and Google, Inc., by the magazine publisher Perfect 10, Inc. The court held that framing and hyperlinking of original images for use in an image search engine constituted a fair use of Perfect 10's images because the use was highly transformative, and thus not an infringement of the magazine's copyright ownership of the original images.^[1]

The case originated as a suit against Google,^[2] with Amazon being added as another defendant at the Circuit Court hearings, because Amazon used thumbnail images that had been obtained from Google.^[3]