Norm Zada (born Norman Askar Zadeh) is the founder of Perfect 10, an adult magazine focusing on women without cosmetic surgery. Zada launched the magazine after a friend was rejected from Playboy magazine because her proportions did not fit the magazine's tastes. He estimates losing approximately $46 million on Perfect 10 since 1996, when the magazine was first published. It has been claimed that these losses have been borne by Zada because of the deductions this allows against gains made in the (money) market.
His magazine was the plaintiff in Perfect 10 v. Google, Inc., a lawsuit charging contributory copyright infringement through the search engine displaying thumbnails of Perfect 10 images hosted at unauthorized third-party sites. Other lawsuits Zada filed involved adult verification system supplier Cybernet Ventures, from which he received a confidential settlement, and Visa and MasterCard, where he alleged that these credit card companies benefited from fees charged to access unauthorized material at third-party pay sites.
It has been claimed that Zada spends minimal time (40 to 50 hours a year) creating content for the site, but '8 hours a day, 365 days a year' on litigation, leading some to call Perfect10 little more than a copyright troll - by 2015, the company had filed 20 to 30 lawsuits.
Prior to starting Perfect 10, he obtained a doctorate in operations research at the University of California, Berkeley and worked at IBM and was an adjunct mathematics professor at Stanford University, Columbia University, UCLA, and UC Irvine, writing articles on applied mathematics as well as the book "Winning Poker Systems." After teaching, he won both backgammon and sports handicapping championships. He later became a money manager. Zadeh made headlines in 1996 when he offered $400,000 for anyone successfully refuting Zadeh's claim that balancing the United States federal budget over a multi-year period without an accompanying substantial trade surplus would be effectively mathematically impossible.