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 members 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-Journals 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 arent 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 ones 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.
Made my first donation to FR just now.
Limited income.
I’ve learned a great deal as a result of the info put forth by fellow members.
I’ve also had the honor of standing at WR.
I’m sorry in to me so long to contribute.
Interesting suggestion. JimRob is already high profile, and it’s his house. But if this great forum gets shut down, I was thinking about foreign blogs myself.
IIRC, the article about this yesterday from the Las Vegas Sun mentioned that RJ was suing the blogs/websites for about $75K. So, if half of the 70 they’re suing settle out of court for half of their $75K demand, RJ will have netted itself a little over a million dollars from this shakedown.
I read in yesterday’s article comments that RJ is bleeding subscribers and has started giving away their Sunday edition for free.
2 + 2 = 4, I say.
Just as a small postscript: I’m not fond of this article’s headline. The fact that a con artist is suing FR has nothing to do with Jimrob either being a veteran or being disabled, just as it has nothing to do with FR being a conservative website, or one of substantial size. RJ is just scatter-shot suing everyone they can in a sleazy attempt to grab some easy money on their way down.
As Jim Thompson would say...FURJ
“Yesterday was not soon enough and today and tomorrow are too late in these types of things.”
Absouletly. Most of us do have backup plans. It would be confusing for a time, but the motivation would spike.
Some people have already mentioned Free Dominion as an emergency backup forum if anything goes wrong here. But thank God this forum is still up.
Free Speech Trenches
U.S. Authorities Shut Down Web Host With 73,000 Blogs citing a history of abuse [Word Press]
http://torrentfreak.com/u-s-authorities-shut-down-wordpress-host-with-73000-blogs-100716
Indeed, TorrentFreak has already received information that other sites, so far unnamed in the media, are being monitored by the authorities on copyright grounds. Now, according to the owner of a free WordPress platform which hosts more than 73,000 blogs, his network of sites has been completely shut down on the orders of the authorities. Blogetery.com has been with host BurstNet for 7 months but on Friday July 9th the site disappeared. The following Monday the owner received an email from BurstNet ... [snip]
[So a single rogue blogger who might even be an ACORN/leftist plant can sabotage an entire political network.]
[Link found on Drudge]
“According to postings at Free Republic, the owner never received a take-down request, and if he had, would have removed the articles immediately.”
Doesn’t make any diofference. That is tantamount to a shoplifter saying “If the shopkeeper had asked me to put it back, I would have” or “He didn’t ask me NOT to take his stuff”.
Just doing a little searching online it is pretty clear that that the LVRJ is fully backing this Righthaven company consisting of the equivalent of ambulance chasing lawyers. And, it looks to me that the LVRJ is in it for the money to be gained by filing the lawsuits. If it were so concerned that its articles were being posted or linked, it should have included the editorial “Enough is enough, Harry” in Righthaven's lawsuit. In this editorial Frederick Sherman, the editor weighed in on Harry Reid's snarky comment to an RJ employee last year, telling him, “I hope you go out of business." The article received 5280 comments on its website by Nevadans and people throughout the country after Free Republic and other sites picked up the story.
It does matter, it falls under the DMCA safe harbor clause when third parties add content.
Indeed.
Bandwidth costs money.
money is generated by advertising Revenue.
Advertisers determine the value of a site by the number of hits a page receives.
A page, if linked to FR by an article, will receive many hits, because FR is a very active site.
Instead of EARNING their revenue in an honest fashion, by generating hits to their site, they would rather extort money through frivolous and predatory lawsuits.
It is ethically, morally, and culturally reprehensible.
Don’t bother confusing Bob with the facts. He seems to have developed an allergy to them lately.
I am not sure what qualifies as a large or small circulation paper. I can tell you that the LVRJ is the major paper in Southern Nevada. It is owned by Stephens Media.
Dang...I hope you are correct.
Thank you.
Isn’t this the paper that Reid told, “I hope you go broke”?
Depends on how much it costs us. If our lawyer can get it dismissed early on, hopefully it won’t cost much.
On the other hand, these guys are after $75,000 plus legal fees, plus they want to seize our domain name taking us off the air altogether. This we will have to fight to the death!
Yes it is. In general, it is a good newspaper. The editorials tend to have a conservative/libertarian viewpoint, in contrast to most of the papers in the country.
bttt
Just curious!
I’ve read LVRJ articles linked at HotAir.com...
Why aren’t they on the list too?
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