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."

Comments

Re:Dumb

[CheshireCatCO]

Well, for one thing: in a lot of the cases, it sounds like the site owners aren't posting the content, it's user-uploaded. That calls for a take-down notice, not a lawsuit. So they're more likely trolling for lawsuit money and not interested in protecting IP.

Also, it isn't clear to me how much of each story is being reposted. Is it the whole thing without commentary? Snippets within a much larger post? Somewhere in between?

Just like the Getty trolls

[Overzeetop]

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.