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

Sunday, March 20, 2011

Steve Green of the Las Vegas Sun: Lawsuits Reduce Protections for Newspapers

Righthaven Lawsuits Backfire, Reduce Protections for Newspapers
U.S. District Court for Nevada Judge James Mahan, in striking the latest fair use blow against Righthaven on Friday, announced a decision that to me would have been unthinkable one year ago: A nonprofit was protected by the fair use doctrine in posting an entire Review-Journal story without authorization.
--snip--
If this decision is adopted by other judges and upheld on appeal, it would mean any nonprofit could post without authorization entire stories from the Las Vegas Sun or any other newspaper -- and presumably television and radio reports as well...
See: Article in full

[The New York Times recently announced its paid subscription model. Subscription revenue instead of "suing their audience" revenue like the Denver Post and Review-Journal have undertaken.]

1 comment:

  1. What makes things worse for newspapers is that there is a great chance that at least one Federal Judge will rule that posting articles and images from newspapers is all fair use because of implied licence due to the papers share buttons. Newspapers may have to choose to either protect their copyrights or get traffic.

    ReplyDelete

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