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Newspapers' New Revenue Plan — Copyright Suits
SpicyBrownMustard writes "Wired magazine has coverage of the numerous lawsuits recently filed by Righthaven, LLC regarding the content of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. 'Borrowing a page from patent trolls, the CEO of fledgling Las Vegas-based Righthaven has begun buying out the copyrights to newspaper content for the sole purpose of suing blogs and websites that re-post those articles without permission. And he says he's making money.' The owner of the LVRJ has commented on the strategy, and the Las Vegas Sun has extensive coverage of each suit filed. The owner of one site has apparently settled for more than the site has made in six years. Media Matters suspects many of the suits may be politically motivated, and thus violate federal election law."
The owned of acdc-bootlegs.com site mentioned in the summary isn't exactly innocent either.
To begin with, the site is devoted to offer downloads of bootlegs, which according to current copyright laws is illegal. Even if you don't think it's a big deal, you have to go by laws.
What the current lawsuit is about is the use of copyrighted content from news sites (and not in fair use manner), again a copyright infringement.
Then he is also doing click fraud:
One thing you can do is click on the Google ads on the left side of all of the pages on this site. I make a few cents from each click, which will go directly to paying the settlement. So the more you click, the more you help. And it's free to you! You do not need to fill out any forms or submit your personal information; just click on the link, let the page load and go from there.
The way the /. story title and summary is worded makes it sound bad, but this guy is also blatantly breaking several laws and frauding advertisers to generate money. He just got what he asked for. He should be happy AC/DC or Google hasn't sued him.
Who exactly is Media Matters suing? Last I checked, being affiliated with a political movement didn't mean you couldn't state your opinion.
Of course I'm not sure why I'm bothering responding to an AC.
That doesn't make the claim wrong and they do lay out their case reasonably clearly. Why not argue against that rather using a vague ad hominem attack?
Anybody with half a brain realizes that facts are free but content is not. I'm actually happy that these websites that simply repost content so they can steal the ad revenue are being sued. How lazy do you have to be to not just write your own content on the same exact subject and do some semblance of research on the topic?
I know this seems evil, but in the end, journalism is important. And if newspapers are going to survive moving into the future, they need to start selling content and protecting content.
I think people should be able to quote 2-3 sentences, summarize your story and link to it. But fully copying content isn't cool. And while I assume I'll get some responses who suggest IP is imaginary and that all information should be free, this is reality. It costs money to produce content. You can give away your content for free if you wish, but content creators deserve the right to make money on their content if they so choose.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
George Soros! Booga Booga!
Really? You're going with that? Go look up Richard Mellon Scaife and then get back to us.
What Media Matters really means is that who they choose not to sue may be politically motivated. The claim is that because they allow people they agree with to use their copyrighted material, they should be required to allow people they oppose to use their copyrighted material. What is the point of copyright if I don't get to pick and choose who gets to copy my material on whatever basis I wish?
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
The MM argument is that the copy righted content has value (as proven by this company). So the act of giving a political party a gift of valuable content is effectively the same as making a campaign contribution. There for, any such actions would require them to follow election campaign laws.
And maybe I missed it, but has MM actually sued yet? Or are they just talking about it?
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Media Matters is a media watchdog that is certainly politically motivated but frequently includes actual facts in their analysis. So it's a valid reference, and we can hope that readers will be intelligent enough to make up their own minds. I'll be nonpartisan and note that Newsbusters does the same thing, just from the other end of America's political spectrum.
Given the possible political angle, it is interesting to see what the different sides are saying about Righthaven.
Liberal? Conservative? Compare perspectives at Left-Right
They don't sound like trolls to me. They find someone infringing their copyright and take steps to protect their work. There's nothing wrong with that. Besides, it's just as easy to find a link to an article rather than repost the entire text of an article. Reposting the whole article is not fair use.
Cory Doctorow talking about cloud computing makes as much sense as George W Bush talking about electrical engineering.
But then, you entered my front yard, climbed into the front seat and drove it away. ....Yet, when it comes to copyrighted material some people think they can not only look at it, but also steal it. And they do. They essentially step into the front yard and drive that content away.
What am I reading here? How can you "drive away" content? After "driving away" with your car, is your car still in place? Unharmed? Ready for you to use? Or sell if you want? Not making a point here. I'm just saying that comparing copyright infringement to driving away a car is beyond silly.
I don't suppose MM does anything similar with regards to using content to make 'contributions'?
Getty, I'm convinced, makes a good living off of crawling the web looking for their images. They put a bunch of them on stock photo CDs years ago, and the licensing on the box covers implies that they are free to use when you buy the cd (royalty free, I believe, its the term). It turns out, though, that by royalty free, they mean you don't have to pay per impression, but you still have to buy a license for each image separately, per year. I got hit for two thumbnails a couple years ago, and had to cough up $2000 for the transgression.
Thing is, for $2k, you can't fight it. And even if you've got a 90% chance of winning (which I didn't, though the oversight was unintentional - or rather, I thought I actually did own a license), it's not worth $20,000-$100,000 legal bill to try and prove you're right.
It extortion, but legal.
Oh, and I'll never, ever license a Getty work, and I actively discourage it with everyone I know.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
He's encouraging people to click on the links. Isn't that what the advertisers want?
Companies now OWN world events!
I'd like to buy some stock.
-Darl McBride
Well I guess that is the standard money making back up plan: If you can't make money by working hard or providing a useful product or service, sue someone else to make money.
How long, I wonder, before one of these lawyers gets the counteroffer: You drop your suit and I don't shoot you?
Just a question for now.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Other newspapers made the decision to move to paywalls and severely reduced the traffic to their site. At least they made some money off that. This guy is creating essentially a free paywall, where people will avoid the site without even bothering to pay for what is shown. I just hope his choice proves fiscally prudent and that whatever he gets in return from the lawsuits, if anything, is worth the decreased traffic to his site.
Media Matters [mediamatters.org] is a media watchdog that is certainly politically motivated but frequently includes actual facts in their analysis. So it's a valid reference, and we can hope that readers will be intelligent enough to make up their own minds.
Media Matters is wrong. All you need to refute them is the recent list of sites that are being sued:
Conservative website among 3 sued over R-J copyrights
The article identifies Free Republic as one of the recently targeted websites.
To be fair, Media Matter's article pre-dates the suit against Free Republic.
It is? I don't recall anything about that, can you tell me which of the first ten amendments relate to selective prosecution? I don't think any of them do, from my cursory re-reading of them. The closest is perhaps the prohibition on cruel or unusual punishment, but I don't think that applies at all.
Selective prosecution (choosing which crimes and criminals to prosecute) allows a judicial system to prioritize crimes or criminals who are most disruptive, to avoid enforcing an unjust law, or merely to scale their workload to fit the number of people they can leverage. For example, we don't have enough cops to ticket everyone for jaywalking, or littering, or speeding. So, the police in some places spend more of their time pursuing things that are either more harmful (robberies/assaults) or more lucrative (drug busts, speed traps). Clearly, in some cases it feels unjust when law enforcement chooses to devote many resources to things like speed traps, but that's a problem with their funding or with their local mandate, rather than with a "problem" of selective prosecution.
Selective prosecution is basically an opposite extreme of "zero tolerance". It allows people in authority to either overlook minor offenses or to tell someone, "Look, you're a good kid, so knock that the hell off" rather than jailing/expelling/punishing them. In some cases it's not a good idea, but it's unwise (IMO) to try to avoid it completely, simply because no matter how hard you work at enforcement, there are always some that slip through your grasp.
Will they sue google for shows clips of the content?
You're right - he probably WILL be sued for pointing out that particular fact. What a moron!
The media (concerning print, TV, radio, news, tabloids, gossip etc.) have set a precedence on who owns the news when they started buying story's from celebrities, accident victims, national hero's, etc. So with a precedence in place, how can they now say that "they" own the story just because they reported it? Unless the person. company, state or Country etc. that they are reporting about have sold the rights to them. Otherwise the news belongs to the person/persons that the news report is based on.