The blog's operator, Mario Lavandeira, retaliated by reposting his site using another ISP, citing the fair use doctrine as reason to be allowed to remain live and online.
"PerezHilton.com stands by its commitment to protect the freedom of people to transform content on the Internet for the purpose of commentary and satire and unquestionably believes that it comports with the fair use exception," Bryan J. Freedman, Lavandeira's lawyer, said in a CNN.com report.
Because Lavandeira alters the photos on his site — usually by carefully placing white smudges and scribbled writing near the subjects' faces — he believes he is altering the copyrighted photos in a way that does not infringe the law.
But Falcon Foto President Jason Tucker, who regularly investigates and sues companies using his company's copyrighted images without permission, told XBIZ that Lavandeira is simply committing theft — and is completely aware of it.
"Even if he's doing it in satire," Tucker said, "somebody else completely exterior of him that's not directly related to the person being written about owns those photos. This is intellectual property. It was made with the intent of that intellectual property being displayed and/or monetized on [content owners'] properties or their licensed properties — not for some yahoo who just jacked it and has decided to use it."
Tucker said that there is a common attitude among Internet users and site operators, that if they find an image on the Internet, they can do whatever they want with it, as if the users are void from having to follow copyright law.
Tucker most recently sued Amsterdam-based Centurion Limited, which owns and operates the affiliate programs Guerrilla Traffic and Porn Profit, for committing more than 700 separate instances of copyright infringement on more than 300 web pages.
Robert Apgood, attorney for Falcon Foto, told XBIZ that it's difficult to assess whether a photo has been altered enough to be considered satire, though it depends on the case.
"Taking a copyrighted image of a person and in the upper right-hand corner he's writing 'This guy is a motherfucker;' that's probably not fair use," Apgood said.
And Lavandeira taking his site down and reposted it using another server, Apgood said, can be considered admission that what he is doing is in fact illegal.
"Under the [Digital Millennium Copyright Act], if the operator feels he has the legal right to use the materials, he can tell his ISP to put his site back up and then the ISP is held harmless because they complied with the act," Apgood said. "Therefore they took advantage of safe harbor."
Tucker said he believes Lavandeira will ultimately "be spanked for a substantial amount of money," and will end up having to pay the piper. Both Apgood and Tucker urge those in the adult industry to be aware of where their images come from.
"I think they should be very careful about what they're doing," Tucker said.
In May Falcon Foto was awarded $3.2 million in damages after a federal judge found the parent company of Porn Kings guilty of infringing on 3,133 of the company's copyrighted images.
Apgood said he had one simple message for industry members: "Don't steal."
