Founded | 1997 |
---|---|
Founder | Laith Alsarraf, Vardan Sarkisov |
Defunct | 2012 |
Revenue | $320 Million (2001) |
Owner | Cybernet Ventures, Inc |
Adult Check, Inc. was an American company that created and hosted one of the first and largest online age verification services. The network of web sites using the Adult Check verification system reached as many as 400,000 [1] and the Adultcheck.com domain was ranked in the top 100 most visited internet web sites as late as 1999. [2]
Cybernet Ventures, Inc., the parent company of Adult Check, was launched in mid 90's by Laith Alsarraf (a UCLA dropout who scrapped his struggling Web site design business) and Vardan Sarkisov. [3]
Age verification services (AVS) arose as an effort to limit access by minors to adult sites by providing access to a large number of sites through a common ID and password. Cybernet Ventures, Inc. created the Adult Check system when the Communications Decency Act of 1996 allowed websites to let visitors prove they were adults by using credit cards. [4] For a fee, customers bought an Adult Check password that unlocked hundreds of thousands of sites, and operators of these sites (webmasters) received a commission. [5]
The company charged $19.95 for a one-year membership, $29.95 for 2 years, and a lifetime membership was $76.95. [3] The company ran on an affiliate marketing model and paid out 50% commissions to adult site owners who referred them members. [3]
Forbes estimated Adult Check's annual revenue as $320 million in 2001. [1]
On April 22, 2002, California courts issued a preliminary injunction against Cybernet Ventures that allowed courts to hear a case by Perfect 10 Magazine, who claimed copyright infringement by some of the sites protected by the Adult Check system. [6] Perfect 10 charged that Adult Check and Cybernet could not seek safe harbor of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. § 512, since they benefitted financially, if indirectly, from these sites. [7] The injunction directed Cybernet to preemptively block access to any website containing the prohibited content.
The injunction was landmark because it opened the door to a broader definition of online liability. Perfect 10 proceeded to file lawsuits against even bigger companies, including Google, Amazon.com, Visa and MasterCard, but was unsuccessful. Similar adult and non-adult content companies sought legal action against intermediary companies like these in lieu of suing small site operators in hopes of big financial settlements. [8]
AgeCheck, a competitor of AdultCheck that had about 250,000 member sites in 2001, was started by 3 Armenian carpenters that worked for Adult Check's co-founder and started a similar business. AdultCheck sued and forced them to change their name to CyberAge. [1]
Napster was a peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing application primarily associated with digital audio file distribution. Founded by Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker, the platform originally launched on June 1, 1999. Audio shared on the service was typically encoded in the MP3 format. As the software became popular, the company encountered legal difficulties over copyright infringement. Napster ceased operations in 2001 after losing multiple lawsuits and filed for bankruptcy in June 2002.
ElcomSoft is a privately owned software company headquartered in Moscow, Russia. Since its establishment in 1990, the company has been working on computer security programs, with the main focus on password and system recovery software.
Universal City Studios, Inc. v. Corley, 273 F.3d 429, was a court ruling at the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. The ruling was the first significant test of the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
An age verification system, also known as an age gate, is any technical system that externally verifies a person's age. These systems are used primarily to restrict access to content classified, either voluntarily or by local laws, as being inappropriate for users under a specific age, such as alcohol, tobacco, gambling, video games with objectionable content, pornography, or to remain in compliance with online privacy laws that regulate the collection of personal information from minors, such as COPPA in the United States.
3-D Secure is a protocol designed to be an additional security layer for online credit and debit card transactions. The name refers to the "three domains" which interact using the protocol: the merchant/acquirer domain, the issuer domain, and the interoperability domain.
Norman Zada is a former adjunct mathematics professor and an entrepreneur. He is the founder of Perfect 10, an adult magazine focusing on women without cosmetic surgery, and runs the United States Investing Competition. Zada is the son of Lotfi Zadeh, the creator of fuzzy logic.
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The WIPO Copyright and Performances and Phonograms Treaties Implementation Act, is a part of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), a 1998 U.S. law. It has two major portions, Section 102, which implements the requirements of the WIPO Copyright Treaty, and Section 103, which arguably provides additional protection against the circumvention of copy prevention systems and prohibits the removal of copyright management information.
RapidShare was an online file hosting service that opened in 2002. In 2009, it was among the Internet's 20 most visited websites and claimed to have 10 petabytes of files uploaded by users with the ability to handle up to three million users simultaneously. Following the takedown of similar service Megaupload in 2012, RapidShare changed its business model to deter the use of its services for distribution of files to large numbers of anonymous users and to focus on personal subscription-only cloud-based file storage. Its popularity fell sharply as a result and, by the end of March 2015, RapidShare ceased to operate and it is defunct. As of 2017, Rapidshare AG was acquired by Kingsley Global.
Perfect 10, Inc. v. Amazon.com, Inc., 508 F.3d 1146 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.
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is a 1998 United States copyright law that implements two 1996 treaties of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). It criminalizes production and dissemination of technology, devices, or services intended to circumvent measures that control access to copyrighted works. It also criminalizes the act of circumventing an access control, whether or not there is actual infringement of copyright itself. In addition, the DMCA heightens the penalties for copyright infringement on the Internet. Passed on October 12, 1998, by a unanimous vote in the United States Senate and signed into law by President Bill Clinton on October 28, 1998, the DMCA amended Title 17 of the United States Code to extend the reach of copyright, while limiting the liability of the providers of online services for copyright infringement by their users.
Perfect 10, Inc. v. CCBill LLC, 488 F.3d 1102, is a U.S. court case between a publisher of an adult entertainment magazine and the webhosting, connectivity, and payment service companies. The plaintiff Perfect 10 asserted that defendants CCBill and CWIE violated copyright, trademark, and state law violation of right of publicity laws, unfair competition, false and misleading advertising by providing services to websites that posted images stolen from Perfect 10's magazine and website. Defendants sought to invoke statutory safe harbor exemptions from copyright infringement liability under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. § 512, and from liability for state law unfair competition, false advertising claims and right of publicity based on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, 47 U.S.C. § 230(c)(1).
RealNetworks, Inc. v. DVD Copy Control Association, Inc., 641 F. Supp. 2d 913 (2009), is a United States District Court case involving RealNetworks, the movie studios and DVD Copy Control Association regarding the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) claims on the manufacturing and distribution of RealDVD, and a breach of license agreement. The district court concluded that RealNetworks violated the anti-circumvention and anti-trafficking provisions of the DMCA when the DVD copying software RealDVD bypasses the copy protection technologies of DVD.
Flava Works, Inc v. Gunter, 689 F.3d 754, is a decision by the United States Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, authored by Judge Richard Posner, which held that Marques Gunter, the sole proprietor of the site myVidster.com, a social bookmarking website that enables its users to share videos posted elsewhere online through embedded frames, was not liable for its users' sharing and embedding of copyrighted videos. The court of appeals reversed the decision of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, which had granted a preliminary injunction against myVidster, citing sufficient knowledge of infringement on Gunter's part, while denying safe harbor defense under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The Court held that Gunter was not directly liable because the copyrighted content was not stored on myVidster's servers, and was not contributorily liable because there was no evidence that conduct by myVidster increased the amount of infringement.
Ouellette v. Viacom, No. 9:10-cv-00133; 2011 WL 1882780, found the safe harbor provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) did not create liability for service providers that take down non-infringing works. This case limited the claims that can be filed against service providers by establishing immunity for service providers' takedown of fair use material, at least from grounds under the DMCA. The court left open whether another "independent basis of liability" could serve as legal grounds for an inappropriate takedown.
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