Newspaper Chain’s New Business Plan: Copyright Suits

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Newspapers and the RIAA now have something in common, filing copyright lawsuits for fun and profit.

Borrowing a page from patent trolls, the CEO of fledgling Las Vegas-based Righthaven has begun buying out the copyrights to newspaper content for the sole purpose of suing blogs and websites that re-post those articles without permission. And he says he’s making money.
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I am so glad I don't live in the USA. Land of the free and home of the fleeced.
 
I'm curious as to what is infringing. Is it putting an portion or posting the whole article? Regardless, looking at this picture what are the chances a buss falls into his office?

>_>
 
martinmsj said:
I'm curious as to what is infringing. Is it putting an portion or posting the whole article? Regardless, looking at this picture what are the chances a buss falls into his office?

>_>
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I think as long as it has words or letter similar to his "articles" then it's grounds for a lawsuit.
In other words, no alpha numerics or English words can be used anywhere on the interweb as he might own them.

What a douche.
No better than debt buying lawyers, Buying up old debt and going after the debtors.
Fucken scum sucking ass licking lawyers!!!!!

Oh, and did I tell you I hate these kinds of lawyers. They are not functioning member of society. Someone should out put down like the plague infested rats they are.

/rant
 
I can't help but think there has to be some sort of protection in place against scumbags like this. Just doesn't make sense that they can navigate the legalities for their own gain ;/
 
eh, comeone, this can have legitimate purposes. internet content is using for the most part the same type of advertising driven revenue concept that tv does. if someone is taking newspaper content and reposting it on their site for the purpose of ad clicks, then that is obvious theft. that being said I have not read the article and do not know what exactly they are targeting. If it is broader than what is stated here, then yeah, that would be a problem. If they also are engaging in terrorist type lawsuits like the RIAA, then another problem with that.
 
Fair Use laws allow the use of copyrighted material for purposes of criticism and satire.
 
Looks like Steve's days posting news are numbered. Time to hire your own reporter, eh Steve? lol
 
I say we kill him!
Yeah!
I say we hang him, *then* we kill him!
Yeah!
I say we stomp him!
Yeah!
Then we tattoo him!
Yeah!
Then we hang him...!
YEAH!'!
And then we kill him!
YEAH!'!'!
I say we let him go.
NO!'!'!
I say ya let me have him first!
 
Agreed sounds about like a typical lawyer. When they're not serving a useful purpose in the legal system they sit on patents and/or copy written material waiting for someone to make a mistake so they can F*** them for fun and profit.
 
Sounds good to me. If blogs and online news sights are just reprinting articles from newspapers and making money from it, then they deserve to pay up. This is no different than if a blog posted entire chapters from a novel. That content is protected. There is a reason the copyright laws exist in the first place.

Don't swipe other people's writing and you have nothing to worry about.
 
"Don't swipe other people's writing and you have nothing to worry about". Ha ha ha, that's the funniest thing I've read on the Internet today.

If your article is even remotely close to the original, you'll get sued. Do you have the resources to go through everything that's ever been written to see if you're committing copyright infringement? This guy is just a scumbag.

BTW...this message is copyright. Any use without my express written consent will result in me suing you and Kyle for hosting it. :D
 
Bgrngod said:
Don't swipe other people's writing and you have nothing to worry about.
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That's true, but doesn't really cover what what the newspapers are trying to prevent. What you state is obvious, as far as where whole, or nearly complete stories, are posted. Good luck with fair use as a defense. Fair use doesn't cover that. Excerpts are generally fair use, especially for purposes of commentary.

The news services/sources/papers are attempting to prevent others from summarizing their articles, where the service did the news collecting. Ars had a good article about the limited USSC protections the news wires won back in 1918 that cover this type of work. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...facts-the-ap-and-the-hot-news-controversy.ars

The headline of this 1918 article is worth the click alone: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9A07EED71F3FE433A25750C0A9639C946996D6CF :p
 
On one hand, that guy sounds like another douche blood-sucking lawyer, but on the other hand I have to wonder if I was the only one that got drilled on not plagiarizing other people's work (copy-pasting whole articles, even with a source is still plagiarism - the correct method is quoting with direct references back to the original author). I mean, the majority of news related sites, including this one, know the basic principle; they link to the original article and quote what they need to directly reference in their writing.

Granted, shouldn't these people first have received take down notices? I thought that was the whole point of the DMCA - you see someone wrongfully using your work, you request them to take it down, and if they don't comply you take them to court over the issue. It seems like these people just jumped the gun right to "let's sue their asses!".
 
freeloader1969 said:
"Don't swipe other people's writing and you have nothing to worry about". Ha ha ha, that's the funniest thing I've read on the Internet today.

If your article is even remotely close to the original, you'll get sued. Do you have the resources to go through everything that's ever been written to see if you're committing copyright infringement? This guy is just a scumbag.

BTW...this message is copyright. Any use without my express written consent will result in me suing you and Kyle for hosting it. :D
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You can't copyright the underlying facts. And independent creation is still a defense, regardless of similarity. And unfair competition (discussed by pxc) is a different issue than copyright.

The article is extremely vague but my guess is it is targeting blogs that, instead of linking to the original article (with perhaps a brief quote/excerpt) like [H] does, they copy-paste the entire article. That is something that is not allowed, even where people then offer a citation link.
 
So what's the four-letter acronym for the cartel of lawyers that will represent the news media? Must end in AA.
 
What a bunch of BS. This guy ADMITS that they are only going after small blogs so they don't have to go to court, then portrays these bloggers actions as criminal. The whole point of news/political blogging is critique and commentary, easily covered by fair use. Hope one of these bloggers decides to fight the charges, might make for a pretty good blog.
 
Ilumine said:
The whole point of news/political blogging is critique and commentary, easily covered by fair use. Hope one of these bloggers decides to fight the charges, might make for a pretty good blog.
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I think you haven't seen the sites which only contain significant excerpts of news as the sole content, sometimes with dozens of news stories on one page. It's usually on a pagerank gamed aggregator page and stuffed with ads, created solely to generate revenue.

And there are definitely bloggers who post articles wholesale. That is generally not fair use.
 
First they came for the pirates, but I wasn't a pirate, so I didn't say anything...
 
It used to be, when you wrote a serious article that you listed all of your references in a gigantic table at the back (of a book usually) sometimes taking as much at 1/20 of the written material.

Nowadays, noone bothers to give props to the references. Its always been hard to copyright words and ideas though, don't even know if they should be.
 
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