Posted on 07/25/2011 5:39:57 AM PDT by rellimpank
The time has come to add copyright lawsuits—alongside casinos—as one of the things Las Vegas is best known for nationally. Copyright lawsuits? Yes, in national legal and media circles, Las Vegas is also now known as the epicenter of newspaper copyright infringement lawsuits. Who would’ve thought?
Well, say hello to Las Vegas’ own Righthaven LLC, the entity behind the curious notoriety.
Since March 2010, Righthaven has teamed with the Las Vegas Review-Journal and the Denver Post to file a whopping 275 federal lawsuits alleging copyright infringement and seeking damages of $150,000 apiece. These lawsuits are filed in retroactive fashion, meaning if someone posted a Review-Journal story without authorization in December, Righthaven spotted the infringement in January, obtained the copyright to the story in February and sued the unsuspecting defendant in March. The suits say Righthaven has the right to collect damages for infringements, be they in the past, the present or the future. Internet sites, bloggers and message board posters throughout North America and in Europe are accused in the suits of posting, without authorization, on their websites partial or entire stories from those newspapers, as well as editorials, columns, graphics and photos.
(Excerpt) Read more at vegasinc.com ...
—ping—
Chickens coming home to roost?
Is lining bird cages, or wrapping fish, with these newspapers misappropriating content?
I wonder how many local papers nobody ever heard of outside of their subscription base gained a following because someone posted a link to one of their stories on a site like this?
This could implicate recycling plants, a $100 trillion industry.
Here’s to Righthaven being taken to the cleaners by all of their targets - including Democratic Underground (welcome to the party!). These are bottom feeders that are even going after hobby bloggers.
As much as I do not like San Francisco, I think the SF Chronicle handled posing of articles in a much more civil manner. They did not threaten a lawsuit against FR, just asked nicely to excerpt and link, with the reasoning that if the reader went to the link, the Chronicle would get website ad revenues for the hits.
Righthaven are “Patent Trolls.”
Oops, itchy posting finger.
Righthaven are like Patent Trolls, only they are “Copyright Trolls.”
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