Posted on 07/21/2010 10:18:58 AM PDT by mnehring
Imagine for a moment your grandmother creating a blog to talk about her gardening. One of her friends leaves a comment on her blog with a news article about gardens in her area. Sounds innocent enough? Actions like this happen every second on the Internet.
Now imagine the news source in the comment suddenly, without warning, suing your grandmother for the comment left on her blog, demanding high monetary compensation and possibly even control of her blog.
Incidents like this happen all the time. The latest targets of these types of lawsuits include Jim Robinson, a disabled veteran, and his website FreeRepublic.com. Free Republic is one of the oldest Conservative news discussion forums on the Internet. It is also non-commercial, relying on donations from members to keep the lights on. At Free Republic, members of the public can post and discuss news articles and most of these member’s identities remain anonymous. One of these anonymous members posted a news article from the website of the Las Vegas Review-Journal without the awareness that this publication has contracted with Righthaven LLC to track down and file lawsuits against anyone who posts articles from their website. According to the Las Vegas Sun, over 70 such lawsuits have been filed by Righthaven on behalf of the Las Vegas Review-Journal since the first of the year, many against small blogs or, like the Free Republic incident, against forums whose anonymous members have posted articles.
According to postings at Free Republic, the owner never received a take-down request, and if he had, would have removed the articles immediately. Free Republic has been very vigilant in providing members “no post” or “excerpt only” lists of publications that wish to limit distribution of their material. Unfortunately for Free Republic and countless other websites, notification of the Las Vegas Review-Journal’s request seems to have come in the form of a lawsuit with no prior notification of their wishes or any take-down notification as required by the safe harbor act of the DMCA.
To complicate matters even further, all article pages at the Las Vegas Review-Journal include links encouraging members to share the content on social networking sites. These links share the title and URL of the article, but provide little guidance to the average person, of what they are or aren’t allowed to post. In the context of the massive amount of lawsuits filed by Righthaven and the Las Vegas Review-Journal, one could come to an opinion that this may be more of a revenue scheme versus legitimately protecting copyrights.
We strongly believe in the protection of one’s intellectual property and respecting copyrights, however, in this day and age of social media, the line of what can be shared versus protected is rarely clear. Luckily for blogs and other website owners, the safe harbor provisions in the DMCA and case law such as Viacom v. YouTube provide protections to citizens from these unclear judgments.
You might try sending your ideas direct to Jim Robinson, owner of this website. It is his call and his alone as to whether he moves FR’s site registration offshore to Panama or elsewhere to avoid harassment lawsuits like this. If he says no, then at least you can say you tried.
Just type in Jim Robinson in the ‘To:’ box and send your idea directly to him. Or send him a private Freepmail.
Your idea is a good one to potentially avoid harrassment lawsuits like this from the LVRJ, but again, you need to bring this directly to Jim Robinson’s attention.
This is pathetic.
I understand and know the need for copyright laws, but sometimes it becomes a joke. I would think the Las Vegas news people would appreciate more hits, more traffic and more intrest in their product which is news reporting. Dying newspapers will continue to die and they deserve it.
Contribute to the FReepathon and that will help Jim as much as anything.
;^)
I forgot the /u, as you can see...
Any knowledgeable judge should instantly throw out the lawsuit based on the existence of those links, which are tantamount to an invitation to the public to "give away our content".
If the RJ doesn't like it, they can sell Bloomberg-like terminals to their subscribers for $100/month and make that the only means of accessing their content. Two or three people might even buy one. :)
That looks like Monument Valley. If that’s the case, that’s not Arizona, but Utah.
“Oh, people are listening. I’ve noticed you posting this data before. You don’t really expect people to openly discuss such a thing here, if they’re considering such a move, do you?”
I suppose you may be right. I have always been an impatient person. Yesterday was not soon enough and today and tomorrow are too late in these types of things.
As you say, publicly yammering about it may not be good. After all, one does not give away one’s war plans. Quite possibly Jim is working on it. But, these things in Panama only take a few days and not a few weeks or months. This fact is what is bothering me; and hence, as I see it, this could have been accomplished a long time ago.
Never the less, thank you for telling me cool my heels and in a polite way to shut up....
:)
That’s one of the “Mittens”. It’s about a half-mile below the line. The far background is Utah.
Thank you for your post.
I am sure JR or someone close to him has been reading these posts so no need to waste my time.
The important thing is to get a hold of Free Dominion, if he hasn’t already, to get a direct line to their folks here in Panama. Soon isn’t soon enough.
God bless JimRob!
Jim Thompson was unavailable for comment.
/johnny
maybe we can get every conservative blog and website on the planet to hold a “post an article from the Las Vegas Review-Journal Day” ?
I AM SPARTACUS!
Kind of like draw Mohammed day
Monument Valley covers portions of both Arizona and Utah. Many of the movies were filmed in Arizona.
Heh... I do try to be polite, but I was actually trying to reassure you. Don't be hard on yourself. You've planted a seed, and given many people a back-up plan, should things go south in a hurry.
I agree with you. Can you tell me if the LVRJ is a large or small circulation paper? Independent or large corporation? I know if it were a Gannett property, it would be a link-only source.
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