In the last week or so, I’ve seen where Righthaven has been bitch-slapped by a federal judge for what it’s been up to.
The judge even found full articles to be reproduced without permission to be fair use. It’s something I’ve always thought was right. How can you have fair discussion of issues, if you have to pay $9.95 a month to every periodical in the nation just to see a full airing of the issues?
While I do see an intrinsic unfairness to periodicals here, the need for the populace to be informed trumps IMO. How can you and I address the problems of the nation, if every news report is immediately under lock and seal post publication?
Here, I found this:
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/06/fair-use-defense/
Righthaven was apparently found to be in the unique situation that no market existed for any of the IP it owned — Righthaven never sold articles. From the point of view of the Las Vegas Sun this would be burning business bridges, as someone might want to purchase licenses to reprint a lot of copies of something the Sun ran every now and then, which would be impossible because the rights are now stuck until kingdom come with Righthaven, but that’s the Sun’s problem. The legal problem it creates for Righthaven is that in a court’s discretionary power to declare a use of copyrighted IP to be fair use, one of the factors the court must look at is the impact of the proposed use upon the potential market. If there is no potential market, if the idea is simply to sit upon the IP and deny it to others forever, this could ironically all but force a finding of fair use.