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.
I don’t see what is novel about it. They purchase the rights past, present, and future to a piece of clearly copyrighted material, and then sue people who have reproduced in full the copyrighted material without permission.
They leave it to a judge obviously to decide if the use was “fair use”, but count on the cost of such litigation to be too great to bother with. It’s sinister, especially how they find the violations before they buy the copyright, but hardly a novel interpretation of the law.
That’s why, on the merits, they now have two judges who have refused to throw out the lawsuits on technicalities (one defendent arguing that they didn’t own the copyright at the time of the infringement, and another arguing that they couldn’t go after someone in another state).
IN my opinion, they should lose in an actual court case, because I don’t see how they would argue they had any real harm. After all, the articles are still on the newspaper’s web site, and none of the articles have suggested that their purchase included a revenue stream from the paper.
Which means that they don’t economically benefit from people reading the articles at the paper’s web site. And since the web site is free, the only benefit the paper gets is from advertising, and if that doesn’t go to Righhaven, Righthaven won’t be able to show any actual damages.
That, along with the fact that Righthaven KNEW of the violations when they purchased the copyrights (which should mitigate the claim that there economic loss is a “loss of value” of the property because of the violations), should make it hard for them to collect damages. They certainly will be able to get the offending posts taken down, but they can do that with an e-mail.
My guess is they keep settling, and will never let one of these go to court. My further guess is that, for a while, they’ll even DROP cases where someone takes them all the way to court.
This won’t stop until someone finds a way to counter-sue them, and makes it prohibitively expensive for them to continue. But I don’t know how that will happen, they appear to be competent lawyers.
meanwhile, we can keep slamming the paper for selling the copyrights, and boycott them, and maybe they will decide this isn’t a good way to make money.
Just be careful who interviews you. I'd make the Las Vegas crowd come up with a release before I'd give them an interview; else I might find myself getting sued for delivering a speech with them claiming I'd copied their stuff.
BTW, none of their intrepetations are novel ~ they're simply stupid. People who sue their audience end up with no audience.