Free Republic

Las Vegas-based newspaper copyright enforcement company Righthaven LLC is now doing business with Media News Group and has sued a blogger for alleged copyright infringement involving a column from the Media News-owned Denver Post. An attorney for Righthaven filed the suit Thursday in federal court in Charleston, S.C. This appears to be the first lawsuit Righthaven has filed in a federal court outside of Nevada, where since March it has filed 179 copyright infringement lawsuits.

On Tuesday, US District Judge Philip S. Gutierrez of Los Angeles, effectively pulled the rug out from underneath that planned defense of an X-BOX modder, arguing that fair use is “irrelevant” to violations of section 1201(a)(1)(A) of the DMCA, under which Crippen is charged.

The libertarian position on intellectual property that is most commonly recited is perhaps the most extreme: the outright abolition of copyright as a relic of the past. Though certainly dramatic and not without some merit, the absence of some sort of copyright protection for creators reeks a little too much of Marxist collectivism by denying, if not vilifying, the profit motive. Hence, a more prudent reconciliation between Article I and Amendment I is in order. It is the purpose of this essay to articulate a standard by which to promote, through practice, an expansion of fair use, specifically as it...

The Las Vegas Review-Journal online copyright infringement lawsuit campaign sustained a setback Tuesday when a judge granted a real estate agent's motion for dismissal, ruling his posting of part of a Review-Journal story on his website amounted to fair use under copyright law.

The 9th Circuit of Appeals has reaffirmed the right of software companies to circumvent the first-sale doctrine by “licensing” rather then “selling” its products. The significance of this ruling cannot be overstated—it could singlehandedly destroy the used software market. In 2005, one Timothy Vernor bought a sealed copy of AutoCAD Release 14 at a garage sale. In 2007, Vernor purchased four used copies of Release 14 from an authorized dealer, Cardwell/Thomas & Associates (CTA). He subsequently placed all but two copies on eBay, and in each instance, Autodesk appealed to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), alleging copyright infringement. In...

Even as Righthaven LLC made headlines for suing Nevada U.S. Senate candidate Sharron Angle last week, attorneys in another Righthaven case accused the firm of misusing the legal system to carry out its copyright infringement lawsuit campaign. Righthaven, controlled by Las Vegas attorney Steven Gibson and the family of Arkansas investment banking billionaire Warren Stephens, has contracted with the Stephens Media LLC-owned Las Vegas Review-Journal to file copyright infringement lawsuits against 117 website owners and bloggers since March.

Righthaven, the company "grubstaked" by the Las Vegas Review Journal, which is basically going around suing any and every site that posts any of its content, continues to up the ante in abusing copyright law. Every week, it's filing more lawsuits. We've actually been hearing from some of the sites that have been sued, and many are lawyering up to fight Righthaven, because the claims are getting increasingly ridiculous. Righthaven appears to not take into account any of the context of the pages on the sites it's suing. For example, many of the sites it's suing involve users -- not...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Owners of the iPhone will be able to legally unlock their devices so they can run software applications that haven't been approved by Apple Inc., according to new government rules announced Monday. The decision to allow the practice commonly known as "jailbreaking" is one of a handful of new exemptions from a 1998 federal law that prohibits people from bypassing technical measures that companies put on their products to prevent unauthorized use of copyright-protected material. For iPhone jailbreakers, the new rules effectively legitimize a practice that has been operating in a legal gray area by exempting it...

Story Newspaper Enlists Startup To Police Web For Copyright Violations Wendy Davis, Apr 22, 2010 07:13 PM As part of a copyright crackdown, a startup called Righthaven has filed five lawsuits against Web sites that allegedly lifted articles from the Las Vegas Review-Journal. In recent weeks, Righthaven has sued the nonprofit group NORML (the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws), the association Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, real estate agent and blogger Matt Farnham, gambling site MajorWager.com and the company MoneyReign, which allegedly runs the site casinoreign.com. The lawsuits allege that the defendants reposted articles,...

Four more website operators were hit with copyright infringement lawsuits Wednesday and Thursday alleging they copied and displayed Las Vegas Review-Journal stories without authorization. In one case filed in Las Vegas federal court, Righthaven LLC sued Portside Inc., a New York City nonprofit, and Portside official Barry Cohen, alleging that in February they posted on Portside's website a Review-Journal story about layoffs. Righthaven is a Las Vegas company that this year obtained copyrights to Review-Journal stories and has now sued 18 website operators claiming they infringed on those copyrights by posting -- without authorization -- R-J stories.

Copyright enforcement group Righthaven has filed two more lawsuits against Web site operators for allegedly copying and linking to articles that originally appeared in the Las Vegas Review-Journal. In the latest lawsuits, against the nonprofit Ecological Internet and the operator of the sports betting site madjacksports.com, as with the prior 11 filed since March, Righthaven says it obtained the copyrights to the newspapers' articles. In all cases, Righthaven apparently went to court without first asking that the articles be removed. While sending takedown notices isn't legally required, it's extremely unusual for content owners to sue over newspaper articles when no...

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...

A conservative news-sharing website with plenty of experience in dealing with copyright issues has been sued for copyright infringement after Las Vegas Review-Journal stories allegedly were posted on its site. Free Republic LLC, James C. Robinson and John Robinson, who are associated with the website www.freerepublic.com in Fresno, Calif., were sued in federal court in Las Vegas on Monday over the postings.

A recent decision by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York has confirmed that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) provides a “safe harbor” for service providers who expeditiously take down allegedly infringing content when they receive written notice from copyright owners. In what may be the first round of a $1 billion dispute -- ongoing since 2007 -- Google subsidiary YouTube, Inc. won a summary judgment motion against Viacom, Inc., the owner of MTV, Comedy Central and other cable television channels, over copyright infringement liability for the posting of Viacom videos on YouTube.com (Viacom Int’l,...

Google has won a landmark ruling as a judge threw out a $1bn lawsuit brought by Viacom accusing the internet giant of allowing copyrighted material on its YouTube service without permission. Viacom had accused Google of "massive intentional copyright infringement". But the Manhattan judge said Google and YouTube could not be held liable merely for having a "general awareness" that videos might be posted illegally. Media conglomerate Viacom said it planned to appeal against the decision. Google called the ruling "an important victory". 'Safe harbour' Viacom had claimed that "tens of thousands of videos" based on its copyrighted works had...

EU ACTA Analysis Leaks: Confirms Plans For Global DMCA, Encourage 3 Strikes Model Monday November 30, 2009 The European Commission analysis of ACTA's Internet chapter has leaked, indicating that the U.S. is seeking to push laws that extend beyond the WIPO Internet treaties and beyond current European Union law (the EC posted the existence of the document last week but refused to make it publicly available). The document contains detailed comments on the U.S. proposal, confirming the U.S. desire to promote a three-strikes and you're out policy, a Global DMCA, harmonized contributory copyright infringement rules, and the establishment of an...

. . Once Again, Entertainment Industry Looks To Force Massive Copyright Changes Via Int'l Treaties from the how-the-game-is-played dept By now you should know that one of the entertainment industry's favorite tools for forcing ever more draconian copyright laws around the world is to use international treaties. Such treaties are not put together by elected officials, but appointed diplomats, often with tremendous input (to the point of allowing them to write the details) from industries that are protected. Then, once those treaties are in place, copyright maximalists just get to sit back and say "but we must make our copyright...

The MPAA apparently said that the “enemies of copyright have really done a good job at creating the false premise that the interest of copyright holders and the interest of society as a whole are antagonistic” during the World Copyright Summit. The worry is that their pro-copyright advocacy perspective is fading away in the public conscious. In an interesting report from IP-Watch where there were a few choice words levelled against those that disagreed with the view-points of the copyright industry. Apparently, Fritz Attaway suggested that it's false to assume that the rights of the industry and the interest of...

John McCain's presidential campaign has discovered the remix-unfriendly aspects of American copyright law, after several of the candidate's campaign videos were pulled from YouTube. McCain has now discovered the rights holder friendly nature of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which forces remixers to fight an uphill battle to prove that their work is a "fair use." However, instead of calling for an overhaul of the much hated law, McCain is calling for VIP treatment for the remixes made by political campaigns.... The only way we will get an effective overhaul of copyright laws will be by forcing politicians to suffer...

A security hole in Adobe Systems Inc software, used to distribute movies and TV shows over the Internet, is giving users free access to record and copy from Amazon.com Inc's video streaming service. The problem exposes online video content to the rampant piracy that plagued the music industry during the Napster era and is undermining efforts by retailers, movie studios and television networks to cash in on a huge Web audience. "It's a fundamental flaw in the Adobe design. This was designed stupidly," said Bruce Schneier, a security expert who is also the chief security technology officer at British Telecom....