Perfect 10, Inc. v. Giganews, Inc.

USENET was a collection of individuals whose computers were connected to one another to exchange messages. To gain access, an individual had to use a commercial USENET provider. Giganews, Inc. (defendant) was such a provider. Giganews owned several USENET servers, which users could access. The users, however, drove the content on those servers by uploading text-based files. The files sometimes had other content, such as images or songs, encoded in the text. Users could then use Giganews’s web-browser application to open the files and decode the other content. Giganews did not select the content uploaded to the USENET servers, and the content was distributed and accessible automatically after users uploaded it. Perfect 10, Inc. (plaintiff) owned thousands of copyrighted adult images. Perfect 10 sued Giganews for, among other things, direct copyright infringement, claiming that many of its images ended up on Giganews’s servers. Through dismissal and summary-judgment orders, the district court dismissed Perfect 10’s claims of direct copyright infringement, reasoning that Perfect 10 had failed to show that Giganews engaged in volitional conduct. Perfect 10 appealed on this issue, arguing that Perfect 10 was not required to show volitional conduct and that even if it was required to show such conduct, Perfect 10 had shown that Giganews had engaged in volitional conduct.