Page:Perfect 10, Inc. v. Amazon.com, Inc..pdf/29

 stop direct infringement by third-party websites. An infringing third-party website can continue to reproduce, display, and distribute its infringing copies of Perfect 10 images after its participation in the AdSense program has ended.

Nor is Google similarly situated to Napster. Napster users infringed the plaintiffs’ reproduction and distribution rights through their use of Napster’s proprietary music-file sharing system. Napster, 239 F.3d at 1011–14. There, the infringing conduct was the use of Napster’s “service to download and upload copyrighted music.” Id. at 1014 (internal quotation omitted). Because Napster had a closed system requiring user registration, and could terminate its users’ accounts and block their access to the Napster system, Napster had the right and ability to prevent its users from engaging in the infringing activity of uploading file names and downloading Napster users’ music files through the Napster system. Id. at 1023–24. By contrast, Google cannot stop any of the third-party websites from reproducing, displaying, and distributing unauthorized copies of Perfect 10’s images because that infringing conduct takes place on the third-party websites. Google cannot terminate those third-party websites or block their ability to “host and serve infringing full-size images” on the Internet. Perfect 10, 416 F.Supp.2d at 831.

Moreover, the district court found that Google lacks the practical ability to police the third-party websites’ infringing conduct. Id. at 857–58. Specifically, the court found that Google’s supervisory power is limited because “Google’s software lacks the ability to analyze every image on the [I]nternet, compare each image to all the other copyrighted images that exist in the world … and determine whether a certain image on the web infringes someone’s copyright.” Id. at 858. The district court also concluded that Perfect 10’s suggestions regarding measures Google could implement to prevent its web crawler from indexing infringing websites and to block access to infringing images were not workable. Id. at 858 n. 25. Rather, the suggestions suffered from both “imprecision and overbreadth.” Id. We hold that these findings are not clearly erroneous. Without image-recognition technology, Google lacks the practical ability to police the infringing activities of third-party websites. This distinguishes Google from the defendants held liable in Napster and Fonovisa. See Napster, 239 F.3d at 1023–24 (Napster had the ability to identify and police infringing conduct by searching its index for song titles); Fonovisa, 76 F.3d at 262 (swap meet operator had the ability to identify and police infringing activity by patrolling its premises).

Perfect 10 argues that Google could manage its own operations to avoid