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.
Righthaven, the ambulance chaser of internet copyright enforcement. low lifes out to make a quick buck, nothing more.
Just in case you hadn’t seen it....
bump
Is there a legal defense fund?
I am happy to contribute to that.
Saw the post and I believe the man.
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.
Absent proof they notified Jim, this case doesn't look too good for them.
I saw an article about this at another Las Vegas paper a few days ago, but didn’t want to post it as a thread since it might cause trouble: Conservative website among 3 sued over R-J copyrights http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2010/jul/20/conservative-website-among-3-sued-over-r-j-copyrig/
How can we donate to helP Jim with legal expenses?
Ugh!
Who is this Gibson character?
I’m sure closing out the FReepathon would help.
https://secure.freerepublic.com/donate/
Same here.
The only ones that win are the lawyers.
Sounds to me like the LVRJ doesn’t have a case - period. No takedown warning? Actively encouraging readers to share content on SN sites? Any decent judge would make the LVRJ and Righthaven split JimRob’s legal costs, AND kick another quarter’s worth of Freepathon his way as compensation for the trouble.
If you look at the lists of those who are being sued (lists on Las Vegas Sun link), most are small websites and blogs. I bet they are hoping that most can’t afford a lawyer or don’t want to go through the trouble and just settle.
Newspapers are desperate for revenue.
A Freeper pointed out that you can Twitter, Facebook, Print, Email, Share and RSS feed their stuff, just don’t put it on a conservative website that Harry, Nancy, Cass and Obamassiah don’t like.
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