Cover of Perfect 10 featuring Marissa Miller early in her career. |
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| Editor | Norm Zada |
|---|---|
| Categories | Men's magazine |
| Frequency | Quarterly |
| First issue | 1997 |
| Country | US |
| Language | English |
| Website | www.perfect10.com |
Perfect 10 was a quarterly men's magazine featuring high resolution photographs of topless or nude women who have not had cosmetic surgery in pensive or artistic poses. Perfect 10 also promoted and film boxing matches between a number of their models, aired most recently as Perfect 10: Model Boxing on the Showtime and HD.net cable channels.
Perfect 10 was often the first to feature upcoming fashion models and glamour models nude, a number of whom went on to become Playboy Playmates or Penthouse Pets, most notably Jodi Paterson (2000 Playboy Playmate of the Year) and Erica Lookadoo (aka Juliet Cariaga, 2000 Penthouse Pet of the Year). Lexie Karlsen posed in Perfect 10, then became both a Playboy Playmate and Penthouse Pet. Miss Universe contestants Evelina Papantoniou (Miss Greece 2001) and Leilani Dowding (Miss Great Britain 1998) also posed for the magazine. Other notable Perfect 10 models included Erica Campbell, Katie Richmond, Veronika Zemanová, Marisa Miller, Tereza Benesova, and Ashley Degenford. Many Page Three girls have appeared in the magazine's pages, like Michelle Marsh and Sophie Howard.
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Perfect 10 was founded by former computer science professor who taught at Stanford, Columbia, and UCLA, championship poker player, and hedge fund manager[1] Norm Zadeh (now Zada) in 1997 when a friend was rejected from Playboy because her proportions didn't fit the magazine's ideal.[2] Before starting Perfect 10, he obtained a doctorate in operations research at the University of California, Berkeley and worked at IBM. To get noticed in an already saturated adult magazine market, Zada gave prominent display to his "$435,000 Perfect 10 Model Search" in which the model from the first year deemed most beautiful by a panel of celebrity judges would receive a $200,000 prize. $100,000 went to second place, and $50,000 to the third place models. The remaining $85,000 was split between the remaining seventeen finalists.
Ashley Degenford eventually won, and went on to land a role on the FX channel's The X Show. Monica Hansen, discovered by seven time Perfect 10 freelance cover photographer and comedy film producer Clifford E Wright, came in second place and went on to do advertising work for The Gap Japan and to appear on the pages of Max, Maxim, and FHM. Marisa Miller, the second runner-up, went on to become a Victoria's Secret and Sports Illustrated swimsuit super model.
In August 2005, Perfect 10 filed suit with the U.S. District Court in Los Angeles to stop Google from caching and displaying thumbnails to third party sites which offer unlicensed images from Perfect 10, arguing that this interfered with their cell-phone thumbnail offer. In February 2006 the court granted the request in part and denied it in part, ruling that the thumbnails were infringing but links sites with images were not. In appeal, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled almost entirely in favor of Google in Perfect 10, Inc. v. Amazon.com, Inc.. The court ruled that Google's use of images was transformative and thus did not infringe Perfect 10's copyright.[3]
In 2006, CCBill was sued in United States District Court in California by Perfect 10.com for "violat[ing] copyright, trademark, and state unfair competition, false advertising and right of publicity laws by providing services to websites that posted images stolen from Perfect 10's magazine and website".[4]
As of March 29, 2007, the Court of Appeals remanded the case back to the District Court to determine the case and denied the request of Perfect 10 to recover attorney's fees and costs.
In January 2011, Perfect 10 again filed suit with the U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, demanding $5m in damages from Megaupload Limited (and its CEO, Kim Schmitz) for copyright infringement.[5]