Righthaven LLC -- a bottom feeding legal outfit -- has teamed up with the Las Vegas Review-Journal and Denver Post to sue mom and pop websites, advocacy and public interest groups and forum board operators for copyright infringement. The strategy of Righthaven is to sue thousands of these website owners, who are primarily unfunded and will be forced to settle out of court.
Righthaven lawsuitsTo date Righthaven has been ordered to pay $323,138 in legal fees and sanctions.Righthaven lawsuits

Thursday, June 23, 2011

Sherman Frederick Lifts Content from Blogger

UPDATE 06/23/11: I have confirmed from Patrick Anderson from GametimeIP.com that he did not give Sherman Frederick permission to post parts of the three article on Sherman Frederick's column. Patrick Anderson is now offering on his blog to sell the rights to any interested party of the three articles in question. Makes you wonder if Sherman Frederick or the LVRJ will take him up on the offer as a defensive move.

UPDATE 06/21/11: Other blogs and sites have picked up on the fact the Sherman Frederick lifted content from another blog to decry lifting content:

TechDirt.com: Righthaven's Biggest Fan Copies Content As Part Of His Argument Against...
PaidContent.org: Righthaven Loses Another—And LV R-J Columnist Has A Strange ‘Defense’

06/19/11
This is interesting. Sherman Frederick, The former editor of the Las Vegas Review Journal and staunch Righthaven supporter as well as current defendant in a counter-suit involving Righthaven may very well have his hands in the cookie jar himself. He has an article on the LVRJ called "Content protection -- Night of the unthinking commentator" Here is the Google Search link for the article in question to avoid giving a direct link to the LVRJ.

Frederick's article contains content from three paragraphs of posts from the blog GametimeIP.com. Frederick fails to even use basic netiquette for citing other sources. The parts taken are not attributed to the author except for a link and not even set in quotation marks which could leave the reader to assume those are Frederick's words and not those of GametimeIP. To prove this point I put one of the portions used by Frederick into a Google search and both GametimeIP and Frederick's column came up.

It is interesting that Sherman Frederick writes about protecting his own content while taking the content from others. This is not the first time this has happened. Frederick embedded a Youtube video of a Saturday Night Live Skit that was later removed by NBC over copyright, as reported by Techdirt.com.

Sherman Frederick may claim he is within fair use, and probably is, but there are so many others that were also within a reasonable definition of fair use who have been called "content thieves" by Frederick and Righthaven so the hypocrisy is quite astounding.

Sherman Frederick once likened cutting and pasting someone else's content to stealing a Cadillac. I ask you Sherman Frederick, why did you take GametimeIP's Cadillac?

1 comment:

  1. It was actually my brother Ted who pointed this out so all credit goes to him.

    ReplyDelete

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