Posted on 09/04/2010 3:59:07 AM PDT by rellimpank
The Las Vegas Review-Journal’s copyright infringement lawsuit partner on Friday sued U.S. Senate candidate Sharron Angle over R-J material posted on her website, allegedly without authorization.
The suit, filed in U.S. District Court in Las Vegas by Righthaven LLC, seeks damages of $150,000 against Angle personally and forfeiture of her website domain name sharronangle.com.
The Democratic Party of Nevada, which has also been sued by Righthaven, charged in an Aug. 23 press release that the Review-Journal had a double standard to “hold Angle harmless while suing the Democratic Party and progressive organizations.”
(Excerpt) Read more at lasvegassun.com ...
Righthaven is sure making a lot of friends these days.
sarc/
If the courts don’t stop this they will be buried by these suits. Other lawyers will pile on. ....Anything for a buck.
Being a member of the ruling Marxist junta of Soros/Obama/Pelosi/Reid can make even the most scurrilious and disingenuous accusation seem legit with the MSM in your pocket.
This is the only way the dinosaur media can stay in business. File lawsuits. Pretty great business model....< / s >
Interesting that they also seek to have her forfeit her campaign domain name.
Is this a typical request for copyright infringement charges? Seems like they’d just request that the content be pulled off or some financial compensation.
But to also request that her campaign domain name be forfeited, in the middle of a very hotly contested race seems a bit suspicious.
Especially when she gave then full credit for the content.
just wondering, how did the lawsuit against google turned out. I remember a while ago, some media companies tried to sue google for google news section, because google news basically cut/paste excerpts with link to source. In fact, freerepublic is pretty much guilty of the same thing
This sort of thing has always been possible ~ newspapers could have pulled it on each other simply by hiring students part time to go through their university news racks to check for otherwise obscure violations.
Today all you need to do is hire an unemployed young person to spend his time in his mother's basement matching up that which appears in the LVJ with stuff elsewhere. In some cases LVJ may well be the source. But, in other cases they won't ~ and if they don't have a release then they are a violator.
Many of the duplicated items will have been run through AP and other "wire services" but as many folks here have noticed AP, et al, are much less careful about how and what they "lift" than they were years back. Even some of the AP stuff appearing in LVJ may well be in violation of copyright.
In many cases a careful analyst would be able to track back to the original source and offer to split the profits by joining in an organized suit against LVJ ~ knowing that the judge will not be sympathetic to LVJ.
LVJ has made this bed and I suspect they can be put out of business the same way.
I guess that is the only way he can make a living. Sueing is more lucrative than writing
It is probably a violation of several campaign laws ~ so time for the legal beagles to find out what sort of felony charges can be laid on Righthaven for this. I’m sure they feel it’s just boilerplate and perfectly acceptable, but there are older laws not often used that keep the Republicans from calling themselves Democrats, and for keeping the Democrats from calling themselves the National Socialist-Workers Party.
Actually this doesn’t appear to be political. Righthaven are equal opportunity douchenozzles...they’ve sued FR, they’ve sued the DUmp, they’ve sued both major political parties in Nevada. To them, it’s all nothing more than a “revenue stream.”
}:-)4
Yes, it seemed to work great for SCO. They finally went bankrupt after dragging some pretty big players through the legal process. They only fed the monkeys (lawyers).
You cannot litigate a profit.
[and if they don’t have a release then they are a violator]
I’ve wondered this too. Every time a reporter gets a story, shouldn’t they be technically getting arelease from eveeryone they interview? Has Sharron Angle given the RJ a release for every article they’ve written about her? I’m petrified of Righthaven, not that they will win long term (it would be a cataclysm), but the amount of damage they can do short term.
I could be wrong because I haven't kept up on every subtle nuance or minor change, but ya gotstahave "copy" to "copy right" it, and oral discussion isn't, per se, copyrightable.
Used to be the case that you had to mark your "copy" to assert a "copyright" but when we flipped over to the international standards several decades back that was no longer needed.
I
It's my thought here that Righthaven didn't bother checking to see if any state laws apply in these cases since "copyright" is a federal issue.
But, alas, conducting an economic attack against a regular political party's candidate is a whole 'nuther game, and even the federal civil rights laws might apply here, particularly since the Republican candidate is a member of SEVERAL DOZEN protected classes!
In a sense, I don’t care if you are right about interviewees not having copyright. I think Righthaven is pushing for novel interpretations of the law, so I see no reason not to offer up our own interpretations. The RJ has opened a can of worms with this, I think they will be surprised at the blowback. They will be caught in endless litigation like SCO, it is a dinosaur strategy.
Maybe the true purpose of the Righthaven lawsuits has now come to light - especially since the liberal Las Vegas Sun’s editor couldn’t quite bring himself to criticize the R/J for employing Righthaven to engage in what seems like cut-and-dried First Amendment violations. It would be interesting to take a closer look at the lawsuit targets. I’ll bet there are a dearth of liberal blogs among them.
Well, Angle did apparently have entire articles posted at her web site.
Without prior approval, I don’t know why anybody would ever think they have the right to just grab copyrighted articles and post them to their own personal web site.
I understand why content providers like YouTube and FreeRepublic can’t be expected to police individual posters ahead of time, but that doesn’t cover people posting things to their own web site.
Heck, I even ask permission before I post my own opinion columns in full anywhere (and at the moment, I don’t have permission to do so, although we are still working on it). So I EXCERPT my own words, since they were bought by someone else.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.